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As noted at Slashdot and Boing-Boing, 35 different Bangalore-based movie producers have worked out an arrangement with IndiaFM.com and Sharman Networks to make Bollywood movies available via the Kazaa file-sharing network. Audiences can download the films for a small fee to watch on their computers; the movie files self-destruct after the viewing is completed. The goal is to make the movies more accessible for international audiences, while still generating income for the filmmakers.

It is something of a half-measure, though. Making the movies single-play only simultaneously removes one of the advantages of a peer-to-peer system (that is, being able to download files from multiple locations) and offers a challenge to enterprising hackers (how do you get rid of the self-destruct code?). And watching a movie file on a computer isn't exactly the highest quality experience, especially if the overall media file quality is reduced to make the file transfer time acceptable.

A better idea would be to make MPEG versions of the movies freely available over something like BitTorrent (a novel peer-to-peer network where the more people download the file, the better your download speed) as inducements for international viewers to demand more Bollywood movies be shown locally. After all, file swapping increases demand for less-well-known musicians; why shouldn't the same logic hold for less-well-known movies?