English Entertainment
Hollywood, BitTorrent team to fight online film piracy
MUMBAI:Hollywood has reached an agreement with file sharing P2P network BitTorrent to reduce illegal internet traffic in pirated films. As per the deal, BitTorrent founder and CEO Bram Cohen will remove links that direct users to pirated content owned by the seven studios that are members of the Motion Picture Association of America.
“BitTorrent Inc. discourages the use of its technology for distributing films without a license to do so,” Cohen said in an official statement. “As such, we are pleased to work with the film industry to remove unauthorized content from bittorrent.com’s search engine.”
The MPAA estimates that the film industry lost $3.5 billion to movie piracy last year, which does not include losses because of illegal online file-swapping.
English Entertainment
Ellison takes his Paramount-Warner Bros case straight to theater owners
The Skydance chief goes to CinemaCon with promises and a skeptical crowd waiting
CALIFORNIA: David Ellison strode into a room packed with thousands of cinema owners and executives at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday and did something rather bold: he looked them in the eye and asked them to trust him.
The chief executive of Paramount Skydance vowed that his company would release a minimum of 30 films a year if regulators greenlight its proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, a deal that has made theater owners deeply, and loudly, nervous.
“I wanted to look every single one of you in the eye and give you my word,” Ellison told the crowd. “Once we combine with Warner Bros, we are going to make a minimum of 30 films annually across both studios.”
It was a confident pitch. Whether it landed is another matter. Cinema operators have already called on regulators to block the deal, and scepticism in the room was hardly concealed.
Ellison pushed back by pointing to recent form. Paramount, born from the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media last August, plans to release 15 films this year, nearly double the eight it put out in 2025. Progress, he argued, was already underway.
He also threw theater owners a bone they have long been chasing: all films, he pledged, would run exclusively in cinemas for a minimum of 45 days, drawing applause from a crowd that has spent years fighting for exactly that commitment across the industry.
“People can speculate all they want,” Ellison said, “but I am standing here today telling you personally that you can count on our complete commitment. And we’ll show you we mean it.”
Fine words. The regulators, however, will have the last one.
