Word: chaplinitis
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Starring Sandra Bullock, Ben Chaplin...
Hallström grew up on film in the 1950s. In that time "before television," he watched Charlie Chaplin flicks and documentaries by his father, an amateur filmmaker. At 10, he made his first movie, The Ghost Thief, a three-minute thriller on 8-mm film. As a teen, he took his camera everywhere, and his precocity later landed him work in TV, which "was my film school," he says. "I worked the cameras and I edited," mostly on music shorts for Swedish television. Gradually, Hallström shifted his focus from the small screen...
...Michelle Chaplin can't get enough Sex and the City. She has seen virtually all 66 episodes of the series--some of them, like the one in which Samantha tries to seduce a priest, repeatedly. But unlike most people, who pay an extra $13 a month on their cable bills to get HBO, which carries the show (and is owned by TIME's parent company AOL Time Warner), Chaplin gets her Sex and the City free. Using a program called Morpheus, she goes online and downloads any episode she wants in as little as 10 minutes. Then she watches...
People like Chaplin pose an increasingly worrisome problem for the $80 billion television industry. Just ask anyone who works in the music business, which in 1999 was upended by a free music service called Napster that made music swapping easy online. While Napster was subsequently hobbled by lawsuits, it pried open a Pandora's jewel box: Last year CD sales declined for the first time in a decade. Now, with the proliferation of a new generation of "file sharing" programs such as Morpheus, people are swapping TV shows and movies along with their music--more than 11 million Americans...
...industry tries to go after individuals like Chaplin, it will probably be an uphill battle. According to Forrester Research, personal video recorders will be in 40% of all U.S. households by 2006. Until better encryption or industry-ordained alternatives give consumers legitimate ways to watch any show, anytime--without bothering to set the VCR--pirating and trading are bound to flourish. Even then, concedes TiVo president Morgan Gunther, "nothing is unhackable." While soap operas and sitcoms may not be getting any smarter, our ways of watching them almost certainly will...