Oscar Screeners & P2P Sharing

Every year Andy Baio does a very cool thing, he tracks how quickly Oscar-nominated films are leaked online to P2P networks. It’s interesting for a number of reasons, but primarily for demonstrating how unreliable the actual Academy members themselves are in keeping Hollywood’s goods off the Internet. The annual results are relatively similar: usually within a week, or sometimes a bit longer, after an Academy screener is released a version of the movie is available for download via BitTorrent (to say nothing of Usenet, Rapidshare, etc.). What would be interesting to see, however, is if the illegal downloading activity spiked after the nominations came out – is the file-sharing community as affected by the hype surround Oscar nominations as the box office often is. Alas, that would be very difficult to study with any great confidence since the data is not really available. In general, though, the most reliable and accessible analysis of Bittorrent behavior is provided by TorrentFreak in their weekly top 10 lists, which generally show a strong correlation between mainstream audience taste and downloaders’ preferences, with some notable exceptions, that is, pretty much anything Science Fiction.

A couple of categories get overlooked by Andy, however, including the documentary and foreign nominees, and also whether any of the nominated films are available in HD resolutions. The documentary and foreign films are easy to skip since they barely appear on the radar of most film-goers to begin with, and HD is not something that is too relevant to Andy’s study as all of the official screeners are standard definition DVD’s. As someone very interested in foreign and documentary films, however, I wanted to see what I could find out about their availability for download.  Read the rest of this entry »