Watch Movies Online

Have you ever wondered how movies end up on the internet? It's actually a really complex process and you may be surprised to find out the answer is a bit different than you might expect. In the good old days before there was online movie streaming, the streets of large cities had vendors at street corners selling bootleg movies. Since the invention of the camcorder, movies have been taped in theaters and processed and sent out into the streets. This used to be a really popular niche black market that was primarily limited to larger cities. If you lived outside of a major metropolitan area, you'd need to go to the theater to watch movies. That's not the case anymore.

In a world of hubpages, facebooks, tweets and torrents, information and media spreads like wildfire. Before the internet, copyright infringement was much easier to manage on a case by case basis. Now, with social networks, video upload sites and peer to peer file sharing, among many other amazing types of new technology, it's become nearly impossible to stop the spreading of pirated content online. What's more notable is the fact that the movie industry, like TV networks, may actually need to move to a new business model in the next few years in an effort to catch up with consumer demand for viewing movies online.

Back to the point at hand. How do movies get online? Well, the answer depends on the movie, but in the majority of cases, a major theatrical release first hits the internet through the distribution of a movie file that has been converted directly from a camcorder. Much like the days of bootleggers on the streets, these initial releases are often of extremely poor quality, the movies themselves are often tilted, people can be seen and heard in the theater and the sound is often extremely muffled. This "Cam" as it's called, is then distributed online, typically by a group of internet pirates whose purpose is to spread their release online in an effort to build their reputation as the first group to quickly release movies to the mass public. Often, these movies are shared via massive distributed networks and once the file gets out, it's impossible to stop. The nature of peer to peer file sharing, Usenet packages and file sharing in general these days essentially guarantees that any new content will spread very rapidly.

After this initial "cam" is released as a file via one of many methods to the masses, it will get uploaded to websites which take video files and convert them into flash or other streaming media. The purpose of these "video upload and sharing" websites is innocent enough, just like youtube, they exist primarily to cater to users demand and rely on user generated content. Unlike Google, however, many of these sites have a significantly more lax policy towards the removal of copyrighted material. With some of these websites being based overseas, they have little reason to respect the copyright laws initially and are interested primarily in the advertising revenue that can be generated from those who seek to watch movies online.

Just like the video sharing sites abound, so to do the next tier of sites, those that share the links to these viewable streams on the web. Websites such as sidereel and Alluc rely on user generated content, in the form of links to movies, to gain the eyeballs of those who are looking for the content. These websites often generate revenue in similar fashion, through more eyes being focused on their free movies sites.

The next tier, the one that ultimately leads people to the content in the first place, is composed of the search engines. Most people go online and search the web to find websites that have active links to movies. Search engines make their money off of advertising campaigns that pull people from the organic listings and push them onto websites that are more commercial in nature.

So the general flow of things is pretty straight forward:

• User goes into the movie theater with a camcorder and films a new release full length movie
• Movie gets converted to a standard video file and distributed via various peer to peer and file sharing technologies, protocols and similar distribution channels
• Those files are pieced back together and uploaded to hundreds of video upload and sharing sites that rely on user generated content
• Websites aggregate links to movies and allow users to rate and comment on the quality and validity of the links in question
• Search engines index websites and list those that are the most appropriate as such in their results pages

Money is made on nearly every step of this process, except there's one problem, none of it goes directly into the pockets of the movie studios. One reason for the extreme hesitancy of movie studios to move their feature releases online is due to the large up front costs associated with movie production. Actors, movie sets, directors, cast, crew and all can cost millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. While the studios haven't caught on yet, there's a lot of demand from consumers to see new movies in the online space. Social networks and other bookmarking sites through an additional layer of context and complexity on top of things that makes it even more difficult for production companies to combat online piracy. At the end of the day, movies that have been extremely popular online have been extremely popular in the box office and without high quality releases for major movies, box office demand remains at an all time high. Until there's a significant change in technology or distribution methods, watching movies online will remain a small percentage of overall movie views.