Movies are just a click away

Lights… cameras…click…the new mantra of new movie buffs. The World Wide Web has opened a portal of convenience for most aficionados who are literally just a click away from their favorite reels. Downloading movies has never been easier. Sites like Mininova, Meganova, Torrent spy... have millions of users who use these peer-to-peer sites or P2P as they are popularly called.

Through these sites you can download movies that are saved in other user's computers. Cinema lovers can get DVD quality films in a compressed format that they can easily download, watch and make copies, all for free.

Yash Raj Films in an attempt to curb this rising tide has ventured into the digital download market where the users can log onto sites like www.watchindia.tv and www.tinselvision.com and download movies from the Yash Raj house for a nominal fee. These services are for viewers across the world except India. Anand Gurnani, Senior Manager, Internet and new Media for Yash Raj says that the reason for not introducing it in India is the low bandwidth in our country. "Movies can take ages to buffer for all Indian Internet providers. But we have started a service tying up with VSNL where for a fee of Rs 75, Indian viewers can download a film, which has a window life of 24 hours. This is an experimental service as we realize that Indian users may not be open to the idea to paying Rs 75 for a movie, which they cannot own."

Production houses have not yet found an effective way to deal with the sharing sites that make it easy for people to own movies without paying them. Anand explains, "We send legal notices to sites that distribute these movies illegally but nothing really comes of it. People go for illegal downloads because there is no site that offers legal ones. That is the reason we are coming up with these sites."

Cinema lovers in the city who download their films are a bit skeptical about the feasibility of these pay per view movie services.