How to Open a "Movie Cafe"?

Posted by Cliff on Tuesday October 22, 2002 @12:11PM from the new-ideas-in-entertainment dept.

tunari asks: "Here in my neck of the woods (Cochabamba, Bolivia) there are hundreds of Internet cafes and Nintendo salons, where you can rent games by the hour. I would like to open a movie salon. I imagine a central CD/DVD jukebox and either dumb terminals or, if possible, TVs. Users would need basic control over playback, and, if possible, some automated way to request new titles. Cost is a big issue, as we will probably be charging less than a dollar per hour. What are some of the ways we could set this up?"

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Large Server + Fast Network by Usquebaugh · 2002-10-22 13:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

Copy the DVD to a hard disk and strip off that encryption guff. OK now you just have to decompress and play.

You can decompress on the server and stream a large quantity of data or stream a smaller quantity of data and uncompress on the client.

I would start doing some quick mental calcs. How many clients can I support with a given infrastructure?

This seems a very expensive way of providing said service. Why not just buy a bunch of TV+DVD players?