One of the main organisers of a recent major film festival says movie companies need to embrace internet distribution and stop lashing out at digital ‘pirates’.

A content programmer at New York's annual Tribeca Film Festival made the comments late last week, saying people’s expectation of entertainment delivery has changed, and movie-makers need to catch up.

People do not pirate films because they want to deprive companies of money, they just want new content on demand, according to Tribeca programmer Cara Cusumano .

“Piracy is less about people not wanting to pay and more about just wanting the immediacy - people saying; ‘I want to watch Spiderman right now’, and downloading it,” Ms Cusumano told the ABC.

“I think that if companies were willing to put that material out there... consumers will follow.”

Internet piracy reached a new level this month in a four-week snapshot of illegal downloads by anti-piracy firm Irdeto. The group says once again that Game of Thrones as the most pirated TV show in the world, while its official viewing figures for the series have also risen.

Several shows experience a bump in ‘legitimate’ viewership on the back of rampant piracy, suggesting that illegal downloading is actually functioning as an effective form of advertising.

The lead case study in this argument is classic British comedy series Monty Python.

When the owners of the cult TV series realised how widespread illegal uploads of their videos to sites such as YouTube really were, they launched their own channel offering the same episodes and clips in higher quality and for free.

The free channel triggered a boost in Monty Python DVD sales of an incredible 23,000 per cent. 

Back at Tribeca, Ms Cusumano says internet pirates are not the black-hearted rapscallions some media companies portray them as.

“It's just that they want to consume films online and they're ready to consume films that way and we're not necessarily offering them in that way,” she said.

“So it's the distribution models that need to catch up.”

“VOD [video on demand] is the new forefront of distribution - seeing films through iTunes or cable on demand, but there's definitely a lot of space online to expand if people are willing to go there - there's certainly an appetite for it.”

Screen Producers Australia executive director Matt Deaner agrees, telling the ABC that the industry clearly has not kept up with technological innovations.

He says old broadcasters need to embrace the internets.

“Because it's on a hiding to nothing if it doesn't,” he said.

“It's where the content is increasingly going to be accessible and accessed from.”

But he says it is not as simple as streaming instead of broadcasting.

“It's a complicated set of moving parts,” he said.

“We also need to reward investment risk.

“The business models that work to reward that risk might not always allow for immediate or online supply.

“There are layers of decision-making that have been debased by certain platforms that wanted to have control.

“We sit in a production creation space and they are investing in content to get a return back - that's where the disconnect happens.”

“Netflix is predominantly an aggregator of other people's intellectual property, licensing other people's content.

“Usually movies are hot because a distributor has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting the product in print and TV and other forms of advertising.

“The major Hollywood studios spend millions on this process with marketing costs rivalling the costs of production.

“They are attempting then to monetise through returns that can justify the investment in both the costs of promotion and production.

“Distributors are usually wanting to encourage cinema-going as part of this process and restrict the immediate access to online so as to encourage the maximum number of people to go to the cinema.

“In Australia there are currently restrictions on quantities of tax support that a film can receive unless the film has a traditional cinema release so this needs to change in order to keep up with audience expectations and where the market for cinema content is sitting,” he said.