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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."
The PS3 has an option to allow/disallow Blu-Ray discs to connect to the Internet. It might be for just this sort of thing?
Now that they've got their servers back up and running, let's slashdot 'em!
Now I remember why I decided to go with software development over network administration!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
1. Take a distributed distribution system.
2. Centralize it create a single point of failure.
3. PROFIT!
People will get BD players that don't suck?
I bought Iron Man shortly after work on Tuesday, and put it in my media center (currently running a demo of Arcsoft Totalmedia Theater). The branded "loading" screen spun for about 10 seconds, it gave me a warning saying it couldn't connect to the BD-Live server, and threw me to the disc's main menu.
(Of course, there is a secondary WTF for the disc being mastered to try to download from BD-Live in the beginning, instead of when you go to the appropriate menu, but the primary WTF is the other players out there not failing gracefully to the disc.)
Today I put the disc in again, and this time it downloaded the content.
(Granted, there are real concerns about the key servers for authenticating BD/HD-DVD discs, but this discussion is just within the scope of downloading extra content via BD-Live.)
I think part of the need for the extra capacity is the volume of the media in the place.
The size difference of the data files from 480p to 720p to 1080p shouldn't be discounted. Having seen the media + added downloadable content as "value add" model on Xbox, it's a good idea in theory, but it appears Sony once again has questionable execution.
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...
I'm sure the capacity is fine, but the paranoid media companies want to force you to use products that will phone home. "Online Content" sounds a hell of a lot nicer than than "DRM" doesn't it?
With all the storage capacity available on these blu-ray discs why should there be any downloading of additional content? Does the movie really fill up the whole disc? Forgive my ignorace, I still haven't made the blu-ray jump.
So I'm trying to decide if this was evil or just total incompetence.
On the evil side, we have:
And on the incompetence side.
Hard to tell. Both are unbelieveable, yet this happened. Thankfully, there is a solution. Don't connect your Blue Ray player to the internet. That will work for now, until they start tying DRM into BD-Live. Idiots.
...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?
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
There is no requirement to actually utilize the BD-Live features to watch this title. I picked it up the other day, popped the disc into my PS3 and let it load. You know what happened? A screen came up ASKING wether or not I wanted to download the additional content. I chose not to, and it continued on its merry way to the main menu and I was able to watch the movie without any issues whatsoever.
No BD-Live just means I can't have the option to have random quiz questions pop up on my screen during the film like "What kind of plane is shooting at Iron Man?" (F-22, btw). So no, it won't cause the world to end if they shut down the servers. All you have to do is click "No" and continue on to watch the movie that you actually bought the disc for.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
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.
Any service built to assume to 100% uptime is really bad architecture.
True, but ... WGA, where the "A" stands for "Advantage" assumes 100% server uptime. Are you saying Microsoft should have learned from themselves?
Oh man, do I remember what I was doing at 6:66 PM that day... it was glorious. A beautiful flock of pigs were flying toward the sunset, and the ground beneath me seemed to be a touch colder (I remembered hearing about hell freezing over a couple of minutes beforehand). Meanwhile, someone, somewhere had divided by zero, causing my calendar to indicate that it was the year 1900.
Good times, good times.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
This definitely breaks First-sale Doctrine. coming straight from Wikipedia:
"In 1997 in Novell v. Network Trade Center 25 F. Supp. 2d 1218 (C.D. Utah 1997)[2] purchaser is an "owner" by way of sale and is entitled to the use and enjoyment of the software with the same rights as exist in the purchase of any other good. Said software transactions do not merely constitute the sale of a license to use the software. The shrinkwrap license included with the software is therefore invalid as against such a purchaser insofar as it purports to maintain title to the software in the copyright owner. Under the first sale doctrine, NTC was able to redistribute the software to end-users without copyright infringement. Transfer of a copyrighted work that is subject to the first sale doctrine extinguishes all distribution rights of the copyright holder upon transfer of title."
and
"In 2008, in Timothy S. Vernor v. Autodesk Inc.[2], a U.S. Federal District Judge in Washington rejected a software vendor's argument that it only licensed copies of its software, rather than selling them, and that therefore any resale of the software constituted copyright infringement. Judge Richard A. Jones cited first-sale doctrine when ruling that a reseller was entitled to sell used copies of the vendor's software regardless of any licensing agreement that might have bound the software's previous owners [3]."
Any service built to assume to 100% uptime is really bad architecture.
If that's the case, then there are lots of really bad architectures in use.
For example, Airline reservation systems. Or Slashdot. Or anything web-based. Or your Visa card, Mastercard, ATM card. Strange how effective those electronic debit machines are, even though they assume 100% uptime of the Visa/MC/Debit back end systems? What about your phone? Doesn't it assume 100% uptime of the call routers and connection?
There are too many examples to mention.
Assuming 100% uptime is only bad architecture if you can't reliably assume near-100% uptime. The important factor is the relative cost of downtime, not the assumption of uptime.
For example, TCP provides a "guarantee of delivery". It overcomes many connection errors in the IP protocol, such as dropped packets, etc, intermittent connection errors, misrouted packets, out-of-order packet delivery, and so on. But no amount of algorithmic magic can change the fact that if somebody trips over a network cable, the destination server has been taken offline for a while.
So we see the real issue isn't whether or not you can count on 100% uptime, but whether or not having downtime in your "100% available" costs all that much.
Are you serving personal pictures on a home DSL line? If so, 99% uptime is probably for you. What's the real cost of a few days of unavailability per year?
Are you serving data commercially? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.9% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 8 hours of downtime per year) Think about the freebie web server on your local ISP. If it's down for a couple of afternoons per year, is anybody going to complain much?
Are you serving financial records for a state government? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.99% uptime may not be worth it. (That's just under 1 hour of downtime per year)
Are you serving cash Visa for nations? If so, anything more than 99.999% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 5 minutes of downtime per year)
Each of these "nines" costs exponentially more. A home computer running the latest consumer grade O/S can generally maintain 2 nines without too much difficulty. A basic server running a server O/S (EG: Linux) can generally sustain close to 3 nines without difficulty. When there's a problem, you can drive to the local colo to reboot the server. Keeping a spare server handy and reliable backups means you can recover in less than 8 hours or so. It gets pretty spendy at 4 nines: 99.99% gives you just under an hour. That means you are hosting a fully redundant cluster, with lots of realtime "auto-recover" options. And 99.999% uptime is insanely expensive. Not only are you fully redundant, but you are actually watching each individual process to ensure that it completes, even if the hardware/process dedicated to it fails.
5 nines, along with high performance, can be ridiculously expensive.
As a hosting provider, we're working hard on that "next nine" to do better than 99.9% uptime to achieve 99.99% uptime. When you have to deal with scale, and high performance, it's harder than you think.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There is nothing in the spec that requires this. If they had wanted they could have tested if the player supported networking and added a new menu which allowed users to manually connect to their servers for extra content.
Frankly this is all Paramount's own fault. Aside from the technical fuckup, I have to question the whole ethic of a disk that automatically "phones home" just by inserting it. For starters it means Paramount are tracking usage of this title. It also means the experience could change every time its loaded. Could we see adverts or new trailers being inserted onto disk? Or studios prominently promoting their own online stores or other content? What happens in 10 years if the website bitrots? Will the disk even play any more or will it hang like it did here?
I think it's very telling that the first prominent user of BD-Live immediately abuses it. BD-Live is IMO a waste of time and will continue to be while it used in such superficial and intrusive ways. Every 2.0 player should have the option to disable internet on a global and per-disk basis. Maybe some day a disk will produce a compelling use for it but nothing comes close yet.
For example, Airline reservation systems. Or Slashdot. Or anything web-based. Or your Visa card, Mastercard, ATM card. Strange how effective those electronic debit machines are, even though they assume 100% uptime of the Visa/MC/Debit back end systems? What about your phone? Doesn't it assume 100% uptime of the call routers and connection?
Actually, all those systems assume that the network will be down "sometimes" and have build-in mechanisms to deal with them. In some cases, there is no solution but to wait for the affected service to come back: my browser did not went dead during the Great Slashdot Blackout. In some other cases, they can continue to work in a degraded mode. For example, a merchant can accept credit and debit card "offline" and process them later. The risks are far greater than processing cards "online" but, hey, the merchant can still sell stuff even if the network is down. Same thing for ATMs: if the network is down, they will still accept cards but will only distribute small amounts of money.
The case for phones is more interesting. The introduction of VOIP actually degraded the reliability of fixed-lines phones, including the reliability of emergency calls. VOIP operators usually weasel out of this mess by stating that "everyone has a cell phone now."
Providing a 99.999% uptime is really expensive. Furthermore, in most cases you can't control every other point in the delivery chain (the network, the other participants' servers...), so a service must be able to deal with downtime. It seems possible to configure some BD players to prevent the disc to download new content. If the Ironman BD cannot run in this case, well that's just means that the application on the disc was not correctly tested.
Nobox: Only simple products.
Just an fyi. Superbowl xxx already happened.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually HiDef (not specifically bluray) is that much better when played full screen on a computer. Do the comparison sometime yourself and you will see that the difference is not subtle. However, I concede that the difference is not so great or obvious on many TVs. Also the degree of difference depends on the title. Some transfers are better than others and some of the older prints do not do so well on HiDef. On those titles there may be virtually no difference at all.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.