There is tremendous financial pressure for the movie studios to do something to counter camcorder pirates, especially when coupled with rising market costs and flattening DVD movie sales.  Last summer, Disney CEO Robert Iger went public with his wish to see the theatrical to DVD window eliminated. Quickly, he was flailed by criticism from theater owners and has since softened his stance. However, now Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons has declared to reporters in Los Angeles last week that the eventual collapse of the delay or window system is inevitable. It does seem a radical approach to counter economic pressures for the studios this way and there are even those in the industry that think it may be the wrong way to go.

One man that feels this way is Fox Filmed Entertainment co-chairman Jim Gianopulos. His concern is that a movie's box office gross is needed as a barometer of sorts, in order to properly set the licensing fees during the subsequent DVD distribution phase. It is his feeling that without this information, the studios might just be cutting their own throats.

In the meantime, it is interesting to read what's simultaneously going on behind the scenes, as the industry struggles to determine their next best move. There was an organized push in the past months in the form of a series of proposals to the DVD Copy Control Association, to modify future DVD players with a new watermarking system that would stop the playback of films from camcorder pirates. 

Unfortunately for the studios, the hobbling measure of DVD of region coding is so easily circumvented, that the suggestion to drop it as an enticement to add another system was rejected. It turns out it wasn't much of a bargaining chip in the eyes of the hardware makers. So the search goes on for the best solution to profit losses for the studios.

Source: Video Business