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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
"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."
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
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.
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.
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