CINEMA owners are looking for a way out of the deep hole they have found themselves in.

They are in such a quandary that the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports over the weekend convened a workshop at the Umana Yana in Georgetown to discuss the way forward for the troubled local industry.

We wonder if the TV outfits there were listening carefully?

For despite all the analysis and examinations, the reality is that the unprecedented mushrooming of TV outfits that do little more than live off pirated movies and other people's products is what largely triggered the current misery for the cinema industry.

Cinema owners and managers complained bitterly about TV outfits airing movies they had no right or licence to while they (the cinema folks) had to pay heavy fees for the rights to screen films.

No one listened, or if they did, paid no attention.

And so soon, it made little sense for people to leave the comfort of their homes to join queues to pay money to see a movie they could watch for free in their living room.

Watching a movie on the TV at home and seeing it on the big screen at the drive-in or big cinema are vastly different experiences and the cinema industry can survive even in face of stiff competition from the television industry.

But it can do so only if there are fair rules and there is an even playing field.

In the United States and in many other countries, cinemas have held their own, even though TV brought a kind of decline.

In those countries home movies are movies shown on the VCR at home, rented at the video store. And new releases have their run on the cinema circuit before the `formatted for TV' is officially released.

Here though, home movies are pirated so brazenly by the TV outfits that they even broadcast the U.S. federal warnings that outline the penalties for publicly showing `home movies'.

Some even have video stores sponsoring pirated movies!

Little wonder that the cinema folks are in the pickle they have been in for quite a while.

As the workshop observed, the cinema people have to change with the times and stay in stride.

Culture Minister, Ms. Gail Teixeira said that for the cinema to survive, it will have to adapt to new methods and carry out structural changes to its infrastructure and its mode of operations, adding that funding to effect these changes will have to be dealt with.

But, for a start, the cinema owners need a fair break and they cannot get it if such piracy reigns much longer.