YouTube vs Chop Socky Theatre

[Andy_S]

The thread on WulinZhi made me wonder... but first a preamble.

When I first started doing MA (TKD) seriously at univ in the UK in the mid-80s, the only audio visual material on the subject was Bruce Lee and assorted Shaw Bros chop socky in the video rental shop; Jackie Chan was just getting started in vid sales. I used to watch a lot of these, not because they were good films (on the whole, they were woeful) but just to see other styles of MA.

Fast forward 30 years. Now, we have instructional vids and DVDs by real masters showing real material (without wires, half-arsed plots or so-bad-it's-good dubbing); moreover, we now have YouTube clips of same at our fingertips.

Has this impacted MA movies?

As per discussion on the magazine thread (ie online communities like this one providing much better info than magazines,as well as being a two-way channel):
I wonder if the interweb is killing off MA movies....?

I don't just mean by streaming piracy, I mean by giving MA beginners (who must numbers in their millions, even just in N American and Western Europe) a peak at varied styles of MA which were previously the sole preserve of Hong Kong cinema.