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Comment by glaugh | Hacker News Reader

My brother works in Hollywood, and would make the distinction that while musicians can make money on tour and with merch, movies basically only make money from selling the right to watch the thing.

I'd like to justify pirating movies, but I actually find that logic compelling. Ideas on other ways for folks in movies to get paid?

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The movie/tv/cable/theater industry's problem is that it's greedy at every level. Region locked DVDs, release windows, forced previews, commercials in the theater before your movie, commercials on paid streaming content (I'm looking at you Cosmos), Amazon for one thing, Apple for another, Netflix for a third, etc, etc. It wreaks of screw the customer, I'm getting mine.

Yes, a lot of this is a consequence of a free market. But so what? The end-result is that popcorn time is a compelling product not solely to get the content for free, but mostly because it's the least hassle way to get content at all.

Kevin Smith has taken his last two movies on the road, selling out venues with a combined "Movie + Q&A" performance. He's presumably making more this way than he would with the traditional theatrical distribution, and he still has the option of putting it on VOD later.

It doesn't scale, though. I don't want to wait around for movies the way you wait for concerts to come around. It is an unpirateable experience, though.

There's a ton of ways Hollywood can get paid but it may not be as easy or profitable.

Although it wouldn't be popular I could imagine Hollywood relying more on product placement. I've noticed TV shows targeted at young people having increasing amounts of brands in them.

Plus there's Kickstarter style. People pay for the movie they want to get made. Veronica Mars was funded this way.

The same could be said about "songs", I guess.

Who is "movies"? The actors? The producers? The director?

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