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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?"
"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?"
Oops. Well, yeah, that's a good point. Unless they somehow focus the transmission at the particular theater that could be done. A.) they'd need a dish capable of recieving the data. I'm guessing that wouldn't be hard to build. B.) They'd need to know where to point it. C.) They'd need to know what to tune in on. and D.) They'd need some way of decoding the transmission.
Err not trying to state the obvious here, but I'm just chewing on what you said. If it were the military, I'd say fat chance. But these guys are probably using off-the-shelf, so to speak, services. I doubt they launched their own satellite or wrote their own protocols etc. If I'm even partially right, then it's possible that some smart guy out there could catch the data and do something with it.
I'd love to hear from somebody that can shed some light on this. I know virtually nothing about satellite technology.
"Derp de derp."
"Or someone on the inside could get it *BEFORE* it's sent out over the link - and before any watermarks or DRM are put in."
Well, to be fair, that possibility exists in a broader proportion right now. Movies these days are edited digitally. I'm oversimplifying quite a bit here, but somebody at the movie studio could wander in, hit 'Export to AVI', and drum their fingers for a while. I can't say I've ever heard of that happening. (err.. well that rang a bell... wasn't somebody at ILM busted for something like that? Help?) It's not clear to me, and maybe I'm just naieve, that incidents like that would rise noticably in the event of satellite distribution.
"Derp de derp."
I'm failing to see the perks behind this. Whatever you are gaining is instantly null and void the first time your main link goes down and no one on the face of planet earth can watch your movie for 12 hours 'till some underpaid tech goes and fixes the problem...
So what?
During the first showing of Matrix Reloaded, the cinema I was watching it at stuffed up the show when suddenly the sound starts coming 5 minutes after the image in the middle of the show.
Subsequently the image went out too. And they could not fix it.
It is not like those projectionists are any better than the underpaid tech.
Wait, in fact your underpaid techs ARE better, they belong to the newer generation, whereas those who can man the projectors are literally dying off.
And your point being?
No technology is perfect.
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Movies are already half digital. The X and Y of the pictures are analog. But the Z (time, made up of frames) is digital. Always has been. Most theaters now encode sound digitally too.
In contrast, normal TV is half digital and half analog, but in a different way. Analog X, digital Y (discrete lines), digital Z (discrete frames) and analog sound.
And sometimes technology advances from digital solutions to analog solutions. Look at rotary telephones (digital) which lost out to DTMF (analog).
Weird huh?
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Smartjog has already been distributing movies via satellite since at least 1 year.
I saw a system along these lines demonstrated by Boeing at Farnborough 2002. I'm a little surprised it's taken this long to deploy, since they had production systems for sale two years ago.
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Concerning piracy issues, I don't think that's really a problem yet. It would only be a few people stealing the movies, rather than the viewing public.
I don't see how Hollywood can abuse this type of distribution. The only thing that would worry me is spiked prices for theatre tickets if they think they could get away with it.
Well, I have to admit that a digital theater is a welcome thing, however there are some considerable drawbacks to this.
First, there are no standards yet which means that however the movie is distributed now, it is likely that the format and encryption will be obsoleted shortly. This makes the films unreadable by future equipment, so might as well just delete them once they've been viewed.
Technology for digital screens is still really new. These projectors should have an extremely high resolution (10240x7680 for example) before theaters consider upgrading since at least quality should be good enough for 20+ years to come. Many if not most movie theaters are quite happy with the resolution of their movie reels and I can only guess that it's the same projection technology as was used 20+ years ago with a few bonus features. I would think it would be an extremely stupid investment for a theater to upgrade their projects knowing that they'll need to upgrade again in 3-5 years.
Theaters specialing in second run films at $1-$2 per showing could not purchase the new equipment and if they could, would have to buy the films directly from the producers. I was under the assumption that these theaters either were owned by the first run ones or at least had rental agreements with them that allowed them to get the reals by association or for a tremendous discount. This means that people who typically can't afford to send their kids to $10-$15 per ticket theaters would be losing out. Or at least their kids would be forced to pirate the film to see it.
Some of my favorite DVD's which I've seen recently include films by Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and other great classics from film studios which no longer exist. By using reels, these films, though not preserved pristinely have been reproduced, cleaned up and with any real money could have been repaired correctly by a real film restoration house by combining 2 copies. In fact, the scans are high resolution and polished beautifully by these restoration houses. The high resolution, though exceeding the film resolution does improve the quality. The fact is that theaters will no longer have reels in warehouses and in basements if this happens. The film will be in the quality which was shipped via DVD to the stores only. This of course is good, but not great. I often create DVD's from my old VHS tapes and obviously could not produce a film of equal quality to what could have been done with even a time degraded reel. Some films I have converted are from studios which have gone bust. I hope one day to see DVD's from people who have recovered these films from archived reels.
I would hope that the movie industry would have the good taste to invest in a joint venture for long term storage of their films in a library suchn as the library of congress in high resolution. Possibly 11 megepixels per frame lossless. They should also warehouse in 2 locations. If a single film required 2 terabytes to store, then it would be the cost of 8 250 gig hard drives for storage. Better yet, use Verbatim dual layer DVD's with the film stored frame by frame as TIFF. The total cost would be not more than $5000 per film per location. This would at least ensure that some day the film could be recovered.
In short, I have never found myself wanting for better picture or better sound in a movie theater, I go to the theater for the environment and for the entertainment of seeing a film on a screen bigger than I can have at home. I like to eat the theater popcorn and get my feet stuck on the dried up soda on the floors. I like to go out with my friends, have a beer before the movie and another after.
I think that the movie industry is spending an incredible amount of time and money on something that doesn't actually provide any benefit other than better methods of distribution. Of course, they only spent a billion last year on it, that's not really much since a film in decent quality digitally would also cost a great deal of money. So I would guess that there really is no major savings this way.
For those not in the know, digicipher II is used in VoOM HD satellite, Motorola cable boxes, canada's Starchoice and the now unpopular american 4Dtv packages for big dishes. I just doubt its in use... it's geared towards conditional access.
Even hidef just isn't beefy enough for a theatre, think 1080i scaled up to a 100ft screen. I'd bet money it's pretty close to a raw format, with custom encryption, though maybe a traditional DVB encoding, more likely some data standard. Probably closer to DirecWay than DirecTV.