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Bollywood New Releases Available via Video-On-Demand

Posted by michael on from the never-have-to-leave-the-house dept.

af_robot writes "There's an announcement of a secure, DivX video-on-demand service for first-run movies, but only for Bollywood movies. 'Each new Bollywood film is released on the public Internet a day before or on the same day of its theatrical release, through piracy on multiple illegal movie download web sites,' said Al Mason, CEO of Cinema on Web. 'Our partnership with DivXNetworks represents the future of entertainment on the Internet. Soon virtually all new major Bollywood and Hollywood movies, including entertainment will be distributed digitally with secure VOD solutions like the one created by DivXNetworks, simultaneously defeating piracy and generating additional revenue for film studios and producers.'"

1 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hackproof secure content delivery system, eh? by speculatrix · · Score: 3, Interesting
    There's only been one unhacked secure video delivery system, and that's the tightly controlled closed proprietary system from NDS called Videoguard, used first by Sky satellite TV in the UK, and is now being adopted across Europe.

    It depends on several things:

    Firstly, proprietary hardware; they don't use a standard conditional access module (CI-CAM), but the decryption hardware is deeply embedded in the receiver

    Secondly, non-standard crypto systems; they don't use or share the crypto algorithms with others; and it's possible to change the algorithm over time to ensure they're a moving target - made possible by proprietary hardware

    Finally, a very active private security team who read bulletin boards, blogs, news sites etc; apparently they visit people who get too "interested". Hello NDS people!

    It's strongly rumoured that NDS's researchers looked very closely at their rivals' systems to learn how they worked, and on discovering weaknesses posted hacks, so that they discredited the opposition and thus drove revenue their way. More interesting, Sky and their associates have flouted European Commission regulations on open and fair access to their technologies where they have a monopoly.

    And for the final irony? The software system driving the set top boxes and the interactive content is called OpenTV, when it is not open at all, and they adapted GNU tools to compile the code and yet didn't contribute those tools back under the GPL until they were forced to!