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"Iron Man" Release Brings Down Paramount's Servers
secmartin writes "Shortly after the release of Iron Man on Blu-ray on October 1, people started complaining of defective discs; the problem turned out to be that all the Blu-ray players downloading additional content brought down Paramount's BD-Live servers, causing delays while loading the disc. Which really makes you wonder what will happen when they decide to shut down this service in a couple of years."
"Which really makes you wonder what will happen..."
Infinite delay... or cracks.
Disconnect from network before playing.
God people are stupid.
TFA is a little sparse, and I don't feel like forking out the cash right now to test whether I can work around the call home feature via a simple loopback definition for the BD live servers in my local DNS cache.
At least Xbox Live has the ability to disable logging into Xbox live to play games. It's built on a system that includes maintenence and downtime. An expected consideration for any online service. Any service built to assume to 100% uptime is really bad architecture.
I thought the only reason for Blue Ray was the enormous additional storage capacity it had.
If now the movie in fact require downloading content from servers, then I bet they don't really use the capacity the disc really have, and make me believe a lot of people will be dissatisfied with the disk as the server is taken off air sometime realizing that some of the content they accessed no longer is available from what they believed to be a disc...
how much live content is there usually? with the huge capacity of dual-layer BDs wouldn't it be more efficient to just put the live content on the disc itself in the first place?
i mean, unless they're having users download more than 4~5 GB of data, it should be possible to squeeze the live content onto the BD by compressing the movie by 1% or stripping out previews. and if they are having users download more than 5 GB of data then that seems really impractical anyway.
the only thing i see live content being good for is perhaps for downloading extra subtitle languages so studios don't have to print localized discs for smaller markets, or perhaps you're a Czech living in the U.S. and want to buy a BD at the local Best Buy but still want Czech subs, etc. and depending on how compressed the audio streams are, they could also do this with alternate language streams.
how much live content is there usually? with the huge capacity of dual-layer BDs wouldn't it be more efficient to just put the live content on the disc itself in the first place?
Without time travel ability, no. "Live content" means "That movie you bought 5 years ago is showing trailers for next summer's movie lineup."
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
...from companies who have also bought into DRM. Go figure, right?
That optional, downloadable content would slow down the movie itself is just another extension of the two minutes of FBI warning I am forced to sit through when I play a DVD in a standard player.
How much further will this go before the majority of people begin to care?
Dead serious question here. I don't have a Blu-Ray player yet. Under what circumstances do they need to be hooked to the internet? Do you have to hook them up when you're doing initial setup? Do you have to hook them up when you want to play any DVD? Do you have to hook them up when you want to play a disc with BD-Live content? What would happen if you just didn't have it hooked to the net and tried to play this?
This sounds like a MASSIVE Design Flaw. It is either a flaw with the BluRay standard, or with the way paramount made the BluRay disk. It should ALWAYS default to an error if the online content can't be downloaded...
However DVD's and BluRay do not NEED downloadable content. Just but the G** **MN content on the DISKS!!! Most people keep their DVD's for years! I have a few that are over 10 years old! And NOBODY is going to keep servers up and running forever just because some movies they released have online content.
pirated movies
it's not just about avoiding $20
it's about avoiding this kind of bullshit
when you weigh down your product with this kind of bullshit, pirate product is superior product
retards
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Probably so they know exactly when and how many times you watch each disc.
They want to be sure the advertisements and trailers are up to date.
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
-- Hanlon's razor
I've worked with Marketing people before and can easily believe that they had no clue about the infrastructure requirements and possible fail points. Actually, even if they did, they wouldn't have asked a techie. They would have asked the techie's manager who probably told them "don't worry about it.
Business as usual in a big, dysfunctional, corporate environment.
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
Yeah or someday there'll be something like a world wide event where the entire world comes to compete for two weeks and when people all try to access the videos which would be available on demand the entire internet will melt! Melt I SAY!
They could even model this event after some sort of ancient event... perhaps a Grecian competition.
Yep. I'm sure NBC and Microsoft have no idea how they're going to plan for such an event. And I'm certain it'll be a complete disaster.
It's about tracking the consumer. Even if the "live content" was all of one kilobyte Paramount would host it on their own server. Having each disk "dial home" is in valuable for marketing and racketeering^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcopyright enforcement.
Sony's Log:
1/1 11:38pm Fo0 watched Bikini Babes 14
...
1/2 08:45pm Fo0 loaded Ironman
1/2 08:45pm Sent ads for Bikini Babes 15 to Fo0
1/2 08:46pm Fo0 watched Ironman
...
6/6 06:66pm All viewing records subpoenaed and enter public record.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
BTW - What is the BFD about this movie?
I suspect that expectations were just really low. For one thing, it's Iron Man. I know Iron Man has some hardcore fans, but he's really not one of the major heroes. (I'm sure some Iron Man fan will flip out at hearing this and tell me all about how he has played a major role in some terribly important events in the Marvel universe.) Also, a big project of that sort, with a relatively unproven director, and I think people imagined all sorts of ways that this thing could turn bad. These sorts of movies generally turn into special effects suck-fests.
But the movie didn't fall down in any of the ways that people were expecting to. That, paired with some decent performances from actors who you would expect to give decent performances, lead to the whole project exceeding expectations. In movies, just as in politics, sometimes exceeding some seriously low expectations ends up getting counted as a major victory.
Still, I'd say it was a pretty solid movie.
With "Live content", that movie you bought 5 years ago is showing trailers for upcoming movies. Long, unskippable trailers. For movies you're not interested in. That use up your bandwidth and make you go over your bandwidth cap.
DIVX players that phoned home was a great idea that mysteriously failed.
Let's secretly try again with the new BD-drm players.
Then we can sell BD-disposables which only work in a phone-home player.
HD-DIVX-DRM+. The ultimate way to hide our data from those consumers!!
Without time travel ability, no. "Live content" means "That movie you bought 5 years ago is showing trailers for next summer's movie lineup."
What about putting live ads on the background billboards or changing the brand of burger the hero eats? I would expect updated product placements will be the next wave of live content.
The downloads aren't mandatory. The BR players are just set to automatically download, which I'm sure most of them can turn this feature off. The content that the Iron Man movie downloaded was extra interactive features, like live chat. Not something required to view the movie. I am surprised that they didn't build their servers to handle such a popular movie. It's almost as if they didn't think Blu-Ray was that popular.
Can I bum a sig?
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But that would be logical and convenient.
You can also build a DB of "first views". If there's a unique serial number on the player, or even the disc, this could then be used for enforcement purposes at a later time. For example, say the disc plays on a player that they later discover is owned by a conference center or a school, etc... That might indicate a "public performance" for which the work is not licensed, therefore copyright infringement.
If the disc keeps popping up on different players, that might indicate a rental disc. If rental discs are issued with a different ID code, it might be used to nail mom & pop rental shops that are buying retail DVD's and renting them, or commercial outfits that are buying discs under restrictive contracts that forbid resale, etc...
All kinds of possibilities when discs phone home. Welcome to the brave new world.
It's never a good financial decision to be an early adopter of a new media technology. You always pay more and get screwed on features.
It all depends how much the "look how cool I am" factor is worth for you.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
Think closely on this one.
When you put the movie in, it must contact a server before you can play it?
This is bullshit DRM. It's not even buying a movie, it's just a rental. This is a violation of every edict of consumerism.
And this is exactly why I refuse to buy blu-ray.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Stop thinking like an engineer (trying to add value) and start thinking like a movie executive (marketing).
If the discs are individually serialized, they get data like this: "50% of viewers watch it once (and never again), 25% watch it twice in the first month (and never again), 15% watch it once or twice (a few weeks after buying it, and then every year or two thereafter -- probably movie fans), and the 10% who watch the movie once or twice a week for the first 6 months probably have small kids and are using it as a babysitter.
Combine serialized discs that phone-home on viewing with geolocation services that cross-reference the IP address with geographical locations, and you've got a profitable data mine. ("The proportion of the population that watches the movie every weekend afternoon tends to be higher in bedroom communities than the baseline, so send out coupons for Iron Man Breakfast Cereal to everyone those neighborhoods.")
Even if the discs aren't serialized, you can learn a lot about demographics by using geolocation services. People on the coastal states don't watch the movie, but people in flyover country do, then you can target your next advertising campaign that much better.
"In Soviet Russia, TV watches you".
Do you [my emphasis] honestly expect us to believe that [snip]
*I* don't expect you to believe that either way- whether the OP did is another matter. Please address that point to him/her.
What I did was to point out that the OP's statement
"That's not really "defectivebydesign", as it's got nothing to do with DRM. It is, however, a defective design"
wasn't the incomprehensible and/or pointless statement that the AC made it out to be. Matter of fact, it was a perfectly sensible and comprehensible expression of the guy's position, whether you thought it believable or not.
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