The movie piracy whack-a-mole popped up again this week in the form of "Popcorn In Your Browser," a Web app that mashes up torrent and streaming sites to make it easy to watch pirated movies.

It will probably get shut down, somehow, sometime soon. The film industry has been idly batting at movie pirates for years, but the issue has never been terribly urgent. People reading this column will think, oh, but it's so easy to pirate movies. That isn't true. It's just difficult enough to pirate movies that most people will settle for the mediocre legal alternatives, even if they don't deliver the library or options you really want.

I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime, and I feel like they have both been getting worse with time. Neither is anywhere near as comprehensive as Spotify is for music. As Netflix and Amazon develop their own libraries of exclusive content, they get less interested in paying for other studios' latest TV shows and movies, and the other content creators start to see them as competitors rather than sales channels.

Yes, Spotify just started streaming video, but it's no game-changer; it's mostly just doing promotional clips, video podcasts and the like.

Moral and ethical issues aside, torrenting is just enough of a hassle that most people will turn to renting movies from Amazon or another video on-demand service. Everybody knows someone who's gotten a warning letter from their ISP. You need specialized software and probably a VPN. The sites are a little arcane. Some are membership-only. The files are very large and often in weird formats.

Most importantly, unlike the total collapse of the music industry under the peer-to-peer onslaught in the early 2000s, Hollywood seems to be doing just fine.

Why the Studios Don't Care

Spotify sucks for everyone in the music industry. The Spotify revolution came because the alternative was the complete evaporation of legal music sales. Also, unlimited streaming had a precedent in radio. Musicians and labels both hate Spotify, but so far they haven't been able to come up with equally compelling alternatives.

If the question is "how to stop piracy," the celestial jukebox that is Spotify was in fact the answer. As early as 2013, peer-to-peer music downloading was plummeting and most people were turning to streaming services or YouTube for their music. The music industry's problem is that it has stabilized at a much less profitable level than in the heyday of CD sales.

The movie industry, on the other hand, isn't doing all that bad. Relatively flat year-on-year U.S. box office has been more than made up for by rising global moviegoing; global box office rose from $31.6 billion in 2010 to $36.4 billion in 2014, according to the MPAA. And a fascinating PriceWaterhouseCoopers analysis sees plenty of opportunities to improve box-office revenues through lower ticket prices, subscription passes, and other ideas. According to PwC, 82 percent of consumers would be willing to pay $10-20 more than a standard movie ticket to watch a new movie in their homes. (The reason that hasn't happened yet is because it would drive cinema owners nuts, but I'm putting it here to show that there are non-streaming opportunities for studios to make money.)

Even home video isn't in crisis. This is extremely important from the torrenting perspective, as most movie torrents are Blu-ray rips, and pretty much anything available on Blu-ray is available from torrent sites. Yes, physical discs are in decline. But digital movie sales are actually on the rise, and movie industry revenues from subscription streaming services like Netflix and Amazon leaped by 26 percent in 2014, according to Deadline Hollywood.

So where music piracy was an existential crisis that forced the industry to adapt in painful ways, movie piracy seems to be a nuisance that just requires occasional swatting at. The problem with this from a consumer perspective is that there's no real force pushing towards more convenient movie-watching alternatives.

What does that mean for you? The status quo. Torrenters gonna torrent. The movie industry will make piracy just difficult enough that it doesn't become too popular, through roving site takedowns and threatening letters from ISPs to consumers, but it won't bother itself too much. But neither will we see the kind of innovation in film distribution that we saw in music, and now in TV. Only a Spotify for movies could stop Popcorn—but it doesn't look like anyone really needs to.

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