a couple watching a movie at home

In Zambia, if you ask anyone at random on the streets about the latest movies, chances are that most of them will have already watched it. Some of these movies are not even formally released yet at the cinema, but you will be surprised at how many people have already watched them? If you ask even more question as to how they managed to watch the movie, you will find that in 99.9% of the times, they haven’t watched the movie from the official distribution system of the movie companies which made the movie.

The are many ‘un-official’ sources of these movies in Zambia, one of them is through the pirated DVD’s which are sold on almost all street corners of the country. These DVDs are very cheap, sometimes if you negotiate you can even get one at K5,000. also for the one buying the pirated DVD, there is a bargain as some of these DVDs are 20-in-1. imagine buying 20 movies at the same time in one DVD at a price which is half what you pay when you go to the cinema. To make  this an even more attractive proposition, you will find the latest, latest movies which are fresh from the studios and everyone is talking about them and you very much want to watch as soon as possible. Its hard to resist the urge to not buy the pirated copy, and maybe wait for some weeks until its showing at the cinema, where you have to pay a higher price to watch it (x2 if you take your spouse along) and you don’t chose what time to watch the movie and if you cant pause the movies to grab a snack, or rewind it if you missed the action. this is one of the reasons i think the pirated DVD market is booming in Zambia at the moment.

The other popular ’un-official’ source is through Peer to Peer sharing. maybe one person will download a copy of the movie on the internet, and before you know it, everyone at his work place has a copy of the movie. Then the workmates will share with their family and friends and before you know it half of the town has access to the movie. With USB flash drives becoming cheap while increasing in the capacities, you can see why its easy to share movies this way. People don’t seem to worry if the flash they are copying from has viruses. If you see anyone with an external hard drive and view what the contents are, you will find probably 60% is taken up by movies (then 30% by music, 1% documents files and the rest is empty space).

These popular major sources of movies in Zambia may not be good for the movie industry because the movie studios need to make money to support the costs of producing these blockbuster hits, but for a country like Zambia which has very limited official distribution sources, probably this is the only way the locals can have access to the latest entertainment. Some i m sure would be willing to pay for a genuine copy which they know would even benefit the studios and will go into making better quality movies for everyone to enjoy, but if you look at the options available, maybe the only places they can buy the original DVD is in Game at Manda Hill , Lusaka or at the Sounds stores and you find that the prices of these DVDs are 10 times higher. So people seem willing to buy the pirated DVDs or copy from a friends flash drive even if the movie will be of poor quality in most instances, where you see shadows walking across the screen and poor sound quality and maybe the edges of the screen are cut off?

Movie piracy will continue to thrive in Zambia until we have more official distributors of original products and the latest movies should be readily available when the movie is launched. but for now, it seems the market segment in Zambia for movies is too small for the movie studios to have official distributors and for them to put some effort in bringing the latest releases to Zambia within a short time frame.