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Movie Distribution Via Satellite
mnewton32 writes "An article in the Vancouver Sun briefly detailed the first satellite-based distribution of a major Hollywood movie. It will be shown on 115 screens at AMC theaters in 27 markets. How long before we can download it on eMule?"
Synopsis from imdb:
stuff
Satalites have more available bandwidth, and unless theres unique ID going on, the files only have to be SENT once, but RECEIVED many times. Multicast.
The studios and the theater owners have been trying to iron the electronic "distribution" problem since 1999, when Episode One came out and Lucas started his push to digital cinema. There was talk that Episode 2/3 would be ONLY availible to cinemas who were all digital. Honestly, there is no reason for the cinemas to "upgrade" to digital anything yet. There are no set standards and anything that is purchased now will be totally obsolete in less than five years. I think the studios are looking at the digital age as a double edged sword. Sure they will save a lot of money by not having to actually distribute and make prints, but they also lose total control over the theaters choice of films. The biggest hurdle of being a filmmaker, even in the digital age, is the dreaded print. You can shoot on video all day long, but if you want to show it in most theaters, you gotta stike a print, which can cost upward $35,000 or more.
:)
"Digital" for the theater is -almost- there. There needs to be a standard for exhibition of digital films that is locked in stone. The current projectors, while good, still look like good video projectors. The actual distribution is almost a non-issue. There are numerous ways of encrypting/securing the data for transmission to the respective theaters. Even the much balyhooed MPEG2 encryption was not broken till a (very smart) teenager found the keys left open by a careless person.
The projector and decoder unit would have to be linked/hardwired, so a univeral standard of security would have to be implemented, no matter who made the projector.
As much as I love film, it's time is up. Winding 5 foot diameter spools of film through a projector seems almost caveman like
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
96% of movies are downloaded through bittorrent(i dont remember where i saw this) so it would porbably be up on supernova, not on emule.
If the movie is stored on a hard disk, why send it via sattelite? Just place it on an FTP server and be done with it.
I think the basic idea is that the film is never stored completely inside the theatre, on any medium. If there's nothing to make a copy from, you can't copy it.
General-purpose Internet is a bit too unreliable to work with just-in-time streaming, and extra-reliable Internet with guaranteed bandwith isn't exactly cheap.
A) This is easy, a 6ft dish is probably more than adequate, possibly as small as a 3ft primestar dish.
B) This wouldn't be impossible to figure, there are only so many satellites. Check out lyngsat.com.
C) Only 2 or 3 frequency bands (and this is almost certainly Ku). Only so many transponders per satellite (about 30).
D) This part is tougher. Is it DVB, is it encrypted with Nagra or Digicipher II? Powervu, videoguard? I'm not even sure how you'd check...
But I suspect this is much beefier than your standard over-compressed HD feed. I'm not sure I'd feel like preparing 500 gigs just to download such a movie.
They didn't launch a satellite specifically for this. They rent bandwidth on one of many satellites up there for all sorts of generic tasks. When they send the daytime soaps to CBS stations across the country, they aren't fedex overnighting VHS tapes to 400 affiliates.
Ground station consists of a $500 fiberglass parabolic dish, and a $2000 (this is a guess, it is a commercial one) reciever, with probably a $5000 disk array. No need to UPS expensive drives where they'll be unwatched for days at a time.
At Farnborough '02 I saw Boeing demonstrating a system like this. They bought off-peak satellite bandwidth and did not stream in real time. As I recall, the movie was about 50GB in total (MPEG-2 compressed). Considering that several of Boeing's largest customers are military, I would consider it highly likely that they are using a fairly good grade of encryption. It's probably going to be a lot easier to take a copy of it once it's been downloaded and decrypted than while it's in the air.
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This is a system developped by Qualcomm and they're using a Linux computer with huge hard drives.
There's a satellite receiver/decoder, and a timing system so the main unit can start movies on multiple screens automatically without the need for human intervention.
I can't give more details without violating an NDA, but the system looks *very* promising.
Lyons Gate and AMC with their proprietary Digital Theatre Distribution System (DTDS),
is directly going against DCI - Digital Cinema Initiatives that is made up from Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros.
They are fighting for control and standards for the new Digital Cinema.
AMC's approch was very slick, they started puting low res tv add up, and deploying these digital projectors then very quickly are pushing movies out. I can't find any info on what AMC's resolution or projectors or or the Satellite system used.
DCI is using microspace or Huges for it's system and has standardized on 2K projectors 2048x1080 this is about where HDTV 1080p/24 is 1920x1080.
DCI also supports 4K 4096x2160 , but from my visit at there test bed, the USC, ETC center they were using 1024x768 video to drive everything.
I have a lot more written on this at
http://www.videotechnology.com/0904/formats.html
http://www.videotechnology.com/old0904.html
http://www.videotechnology.com/old1004.html
http://www.videotechnology.com/old0804.html
http://www.videotechnology.com/old0604.html
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Back in May '02 Boeing satellites were used to send copies of Attack of the Clones for digital projection. I'm not sure where this weeks' article gets off saying that Final Cut is the first film to do this, unless they're claiming that 115 screens is the achievement here, and not the actual process of sending the files.
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