It’s hard to believe that Hol­ly­wood, the mecca of film and enter­tain­ment, has only uti­lized the Inter­net for less than ten years and yet within that time frame they’ve man­aged to increase aware­ness of upcom­ing films and thus increas­ing their rev­enue ten fold.

Yet, it’s no secret that Hol­ly­wood has been using some form of adver­tis­ing for their films, even before the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, in 1927. To increase aware­ness, Hol­ly­wood has in the past and still to this day use mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als such as full-page spreads, bill­board ads or pro­mo­tional press packets.

In 1994, when Angels in the Out­field was due for release, Dis­ney sent auto­graphed base­balls signed by stars Tony Danza and Danny Glover to sev­eral local busi­nesses and even shared a few left­overs with their employ­ees (I still have mine). This pro­mo­tional strat­egy, in addi­tion to other mar­ket­ing meth­ods, worked in the effect that the film had a good run at the box office earn­ing about $50 mil­lion in 1994 ($8 mil­lion of it’s total gross was earned in its first week).

Cut to 1994, when at the time only an esti­mated 30 mil­lion peo­ple were using the Inter­net and a newly formed com­pany, Dig­i­tal Planet, sought out movie stu­dios with a lucra­tive offer; they would build web sites to pro­mote upcom­ing movies. Dig­i­tal Planet, a group of adver­tis­ers, graphic artists and web design­ers saw the poten­tial in using the Inter­net as a means of mar­ket­ing for Hol­ly­wood. In doing so, they intro­duced their tal­ent to Hol­ly­wood know­ing full well that if Hol­ly­wood took the bait — hook, line and sinker — this would change the course of film dis­tri­b­u­tion and adver­tise­ment for the better.

One of the first film sites cre­ated by Dig­i­tal Planet and mar­keted by Hol­ly­wood was the sci-fi hit, Star­gate, star­ring Kurt Rus­sell. The site in com­par­i­son to today’s movie sites was noth­ing more than a few .gifs scat­tered on a grey back­ground, with the pos­si­bil­ity of a “sneak peak” trailer. At the time, when broad­band wasn’t as much as a comod­ity as it is today, it would take any­where from 45 min­utes to an hour to down­load a 20 sec­ond clip. Even then, the qual­ity of the Quick­time file was poor and choppy and the sound was barely audi­ble, but as tech­nol­ogy improved over time so would the qual­ity of the video.

Hol­ly­wood and Dig­i­tal Planet real­ized that users would seek out these sites for insider infor­ma­tion and behind-the-scenes back­ground on the pro­duc­tion process. There­fore they prod­ded direc­tors, writ­ers and cast mem­bers for first-hand encoun­ters and back­story mate­r­ial. Even­tu­ally, impres­sions (or web traf­fic) increased and before they knew it the film’s site was being spread via email, news­groups and word of mouth. Years later, the cre­ators of the Blair Witch Project would expand upon this idea and use the web site as a pre­tense for their film, which went on to earn over $140 mil­lion world­wide while the pro­duc­tion of the movie only cost a mere $60,000.

Today, with the advent of cheaper broad­band, file shar­ing net­works and tech­nolo­gies like Bit­tor­rent, down­load­ing com­plete films which range any­where from 500MB to 2GBs, is just a mat­ter of wait­ing a few hours and even­tu­ally the film is on your hard drive. File shar­ing of copy­righted works, includ­ing movies and music, has sent a shock­wave of ter­ror through Hol­ly­wood. In the process of adver­tis­ing their films, they are spend­ing just as much money on try­ing to stop the file shar­ing and find­ing that it’s a dif­fi­cult task con­sid­er­ing file shar­ing in it’s sim­plest sense is more akin to an unstop­pable and spread­ing virus.

Only time will tell what the out­come of file shar­ing will do, but if it’s up to Hol­ly­wood to stop this epi­demic they might fol­low the advice; “If you can’t beat them, join them.” More or less, giv­ing peo­ple the oppor­tu­nity to pur­chase films over the Inter­net, which is already being accom­plished by sites like Movieflix which allows peo­ple to down­load a movie cheaper than most rental costs. This might not stop file-sharing, but it’s pos­si­ble that it might decrease the file-sharing per­cent­age some­what. How­ever, as down­load and upload speeds increase so will the abil­ity to share movies and music at higher res­o­lu­tions with bet­ter sound qual­ity. That said, the beast has been unleashed and once Pandora’s Box has been released the only way to stop file-sharing is to stomp out the con­sumers, which most times are also the same indi­vid­u­als who pur­chase $90.00 DVD col­lec­tions and spend $7.50 – 9.00 a ticket to see the next block­buster at a the­atre near you.