Issues in Philippine Cinema

There are basically six technology-driven threats to the traditional rental model: (1) Cable companies offering Video on Demand (VOD), (2) online movie downloads, (3) online movie rentals, (4) disposable DVDs, (5) illegal movie downloads and DVD copying, and (6) Digital (or Personal) video recorders (DVR). (Jackson) One could also consider traditional pay-per-view (PPV) as and additional substitute. Only one of these seven, online movie rentals has proven to be a major competitive substitute for traditional movie rentals. All other areas, except traditional pay-per-view are expanding rapidly, but some face significant challenges.

This paper was prepared for Introduction to Film History, Module 1 Homework Assignment, taught by Professor Stephanie Sandifer.

This essay explores the popularity of Australian film, both locally and internationally and asks the question: Is there a crisis in the Australian Film Industry? This essay will go through the current issues the Australian Film Industry and will demonstrate examples of those problems.

2. Pirogi, Jeanine. (2013). Titled: The Rise & Fall of Blockbuster: The very Long & Rewinding Road" (The Street). N.p., 23 Sept. 2010. Wide-Web. 11-Dec.

Occasionally, people use to go out and rent DVD’s to watch a specific movie from rental stores. Advancement in technology has brought a sufficient change in customer’s behaviors, today DVD rental stores have almost gone. Moreover, by time we saw enormous increase in channels being provided by cable providers, but today even that has been replaced by streaming media devices, thus my time, role of cable providers might also disappear due to the introduction of devices such as Netflix, Apple TV etc. “DVD sales have also been hit. The Los Angeles-based Digital Entertainment Group estimates DVD sales in 2008 fell 8% to $21.6 billion from a year earlier, while DVD rentals were flat.” Charny, Ben. "Viewers Tap Free Web Content." Wall Street Journal, Eastern

Retail spending on discs remained strong, indicating that physical and digital formats will continue to coexist in the marketplace. While overall disc unit sales were down 6 percent form the previous year, sales of movies and TV shows on Blu-ray continued to offset the decline in DVD sales. Sales of Blu-ray disc grew by 7 percent and accounted for 20 percent of total disc sales, up from 18 percent the previous year (Consumer Report 2013)

The poor distribution of Australian films has made it difficult for the public to view these said films, due to the lack of theatres screening the actual pictures. This contributes to the community of the Australian public to collectively be unaware of these films and leads to the small number of tickets sold in cinemas. With this lack of money being spent on Australian films, the industry suffers due to with no return going into the

is growing outside of the USA. This kind of growth includes the large countries that previously specialised in film production. For countries such as China and India, the annual release of films has grown progressively for the past decade, followed by a forced growing purchase power and investments in cinemas (Lorenzen, M. 2008). The American film industry must, in a way, watch its back. Especially when the amount of small film countries, such as Denmark and Switzerland, has grown. The smaller countries have attracted attention by not only up-scaling their production, but also winning market shares from Hollywood. Other new filmmaking countries are also on the rise, with Korea, Mexico etc. joining the market, who bring cheaper production technologies to their advantage (Lorenzen, M. 2008).

Ticket sales for movie theaters are at their lowest point since 1996. With the core demographic group expected to grow slower than the US population and with technological advances growing at speeds faster than the industry can keep up, ticket sales will continue to decline if the current business strategy continues to be followed.

The modern film industry was born around the beginning of the twentieth century. On April 23rd 1896 Thomas Edition showed the first publicly-projected motion picture at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City. From there the film industry had an explosive growth rate. In fact,

The competitive forces in the movie rental industry are quite strong, as I will explain through the five forces model. There are a vast amount of substitutes for watching a movie. You can go to a play, sporting event, concert, out the lake/beach, go for a run, watch regular television, go shopping; I could go on and on. Also, torrenting or pirating movies is growing increasingly popular. Buyers have a strong presence in this industry mainly because they are picky about how much they will pay to rent or stream a movie. With the amount of substitutes and their pickiness, they make this

Online piracy is commonly referred to as a threat to businesses in the creative industries. The WTO Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (a.k.a. “the TRIPS” agreement) defines piracy as:

Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the Cato Institute, provides an interesting outlook on the issue of piracy, and what should be done. He compares the actions taken in the movie and television industry to prevent piracy by stating:

The rise of the Internet era opened the whole new market for traditional media full of opportunities as well as threats. Online piracy being one of them because the music and film industry loses £5.4bn in a year and if it was reduced by 10% it could have created up to 13 thousand jobs in the UK. There are various attempts taken to fight with online piracy; a case study of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement will be considered as well as other legislations attempting to regulate copyrights in the Internet. This

Before the advent of movie rental stores, to watch a new movie, people had to go to theatres or cinemas spending a lot of money. Video rental was the answer to the new needs. Since the 90s, video rental industry has become a very big business; in those years, rental prices rose as more and more people began renting movies. At the same time, new players entered the market creating strong competition inside the industry. In the last years, the field of home entertainment has changed dramatically because of the presence of Internet and new technologies (Recorded DVD & Video in the United States, 2009).