Lasse Penttinen
7 May 2004 11:00
The history repeats itself again. The so called 'MP3 revolution' that occurred in the 90's has evolved into booming movie downloads. This is of course made possible by the increasing coverage of broadband connection networks and the suitable compression methods.
The phenomena started few years back with VideoCD and DivX formats and the trend has been towards higher quality of the downloaded video. Divx (or other MPEG-4 variant) video is combined with multi channel sound, or perhaps SVCD MPEG-2 format has been used. The increasing connection speeds and booming DVD-R drive market have made DVD copies very popular on the Internet.
The BBC reports that the number illegal movie or TV files downloads have tripled last year. But the DVD sales seem to develop quite nicely too..
An estimated 1.67 million people download illegal film or TV files, compared to 570,000 last year, the British Video Association (BVA) found.
Source: BBC
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The average film or TV downloader was identified as under 35 years old and male.
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"As long as we can continue to make our traditional product attractive and future online offers affordable and easy, we hope to avoid the worst of the damage."
The BVA also reported a 61% increase in DVD sales in 2003, the format now representing 70% of the total video market.