TVNorge have done reasearch that shows a loss of about 10% of the viewers on the series “Lost” to filesharing and bittorrent. I am puzzled by the fact that the big studios don’t get the point. If they have a look at the music industry they can see parts of the solution. One of them is called iTunes Music Store. Or, to be very precise: legal and user friendly alternatives.
The reason why so many people downloaded Lost here in Norway is the fact that we got the episodes months behind the US. So, the brilliant story telling in Lost became the biggest motivation for download of new episodes from the net. The people in the movie and television industry are wizards at visual communication. In a hope that they might get the point I have taken up the art of comic drawing. Something that I have not done since the age of 14. You can clearly see that in my story about Bob the Millionaire, but the message is the important stuff here. The strip about Bob the Millionaire is based on a true story. And, Bob the Millionaire is in for a very pleasant surprise:

Do-you-get-it? Bob could not resist. And as a bonus he gets the episodes in a quality that no Norwegian television stations can give you today. Related post: Help for the left behind Yes, they will release Lost on DVD in Norway, but what quality? Probably standard definition. So, even if it was possible to buy Lost you would get better quality through BitTorrent… Hello? Anybody home? And, here’s a list of simple hints for the movie industry: 1. As already mentioned: make user friendly, high quality alternatives to illegal download 2. Remember: the world is connected! : The system of different regions on DVD was a bad idea even at the point where DVD was born back in 1996 : To even think about dividing the planet into something other than 6 billion potential viewers is utterly ridiculous 3. Availability! People want to play their content on all their devices Feel free to add more hints to the movie industry here by adding comments.