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?"

Comments

NEI

[NanoGator]

"How long before we can download it on eMule?"

Somehow I doubt the file being sent will run in Media Player. They'd have to take the humungoid file and get it to a computer to transcode. That may one day be possible, but there's a couple of things tricky about that:

1.) It'd have to be an inside job involving a firewire drive or something. It'd be easy enough to disable the ports necessary to do that.

2.) It wouldn't be all that hard to send unique identifiers to each theater as the file comes along. (At least from a technological point of view.) If the tools are created, it'd make catching peeps doing this a lot easier.

I am, in no way, saying it won't happen. But if I were a betting man, I'd say the traditional "bring a video camera to the theater" trick will remain popular.

Re:NEI

[chewy_2000]

IANA satellite engineer, but apart from any encryption, would there be anything stopping someone with a reciever and the right gear grabbing, ripping and sharing this?
I'm guessing the equipment wouldn't be entirely proprietary , and the protection could well be breakable (CSS..)

Why use a sattelite?

[broothal]

"- Every time the movie is shown, the digitized information is retrieved via a local area network from hard disc storage. It's then decrypted, decompressed and displayed using cinema-quality electronic projectors."

Well, in the immortal words of Homer Simpson "Well Marge, have you ever heard about a little thing called the internet?". 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.

Cost effective?

[Viceice]

How cost effective is sending movies this way? I'm pretty sure that compared to the cost of designing, building, launching then maintaining a satellite + gound station + all the specialized gear needed at each screen to do this, it might be cheaper to just UPS a high capacity HDD for each movie.

Re:About time..

[jerw134]

The movie isn't shown live off the satellite feed, that would be stupid. It's transmitted beforehand and stored at each theater.

Cost of Ku Bandwidth

[kd3bj]

Satellite systems have been used to distribute Usenet for many years. I know from that experience that you can get a decent chunk of Ku transponder bandwidth for low 5 figures US$. Especially if you are willing to accept conditional bandwidth. It costs a lot more if you need a guarantee of bandwidth uptime (as TV/Cable guys often do). Theater movies don't need to be sent in guaranteed real time, I would think. Anytime before Friday should do.

If you are distributing a movie to a high 5-figure quantity of theaters with a system that costs low 5-figures per month, other than fixed installation costs, its clear that you can drive the marginal cost of distributing films down below a dollar.

An inevitable result of these falling distribution costs and increased distribution alternatives would normally be increased competition amongst distributors, spurring innovation, increasing availability and lowering cost to end consumers. Distributors that refuse to switch to low-cost satellite/internet/fedex-optical-media systems would be forced into bankrupcy.

That's how it works in a free market competitive economy according to generally understood and accepted capitalist principals.

Of course, we're talking the MPAA here, so my point regarding the result of lowered costs is merely theoretical. More likely, adoption of digital distribution systems will just inflate movie company profits even higher, with no benefit to the movie consumer.