Sunday, June 19, 2005

Crackdown on video piracy yields results in TN

NDTV: "The Tamil Nadu government has been consistently cracking down on video piracy and this is helping the industry recover from the slump of the past few years. Now it has become more and more difficult to get hold of pirated copies of the latest films. Rajnikanth's latest film Chandramukhi is benefitting by this drive. People are now going to theatres rather than scurrying around to find a pirated version.

"There's a sort of scare about using illegal videos. Cutting off the videos in the video buses also has had a big impact," said Abirami Ramanathan, Abirami Theatres. The menace of video piracy has not yet been completely wiped out and constant raids by the police continue to yield pirated videos. It is an issue on which the film industry has never been divided. Their concerns, expressed to the government, have yielded results.

"Pirated copies have been stopped to a limit by this government now and we are very happy about that," said Prabhu, actor and producer. Apart from the magic of Chandramukhi, another reason for the film's success could be Tamil Nadu government's crackdown on video piracy."

1 comment:

Vijay Krishna Narayanan said...

As a policy decision, yes, it is working. But curbing video piracy has more than just the one angle.

Rising ticket prices, especially the free run given to theatres during the first week, has a great bearing on why people prefer CDs.

Also the people of TN have shown that they will watch good movies in theatres... even before the clampdown, 2003 was a golden year. Reason: lotsa good movies.