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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?"
It's called television.
Synopsis from imdb:
stuff
Oct. 15 ?
"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.
"Derp de derp."
"- 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.
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.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
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
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.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
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?
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
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.
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.
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.
The movie isn't shown live off the satellite feed, that would be stupid. It's transmitted beforehand and stored at each theater.
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.
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