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Movies Media

Movie Distribution Via Satellite 107

Posted by michael from the your-download-is-3%-complete dept.
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?"
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Movie Distribution Via Satellite More

Movie Distribution Via Satellite

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  • There's already movie distribution via satellite.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 03, 2004 @06:07AM (#10418951)
    It's called television.

  • The Final Cut (Score:4, Informative)

    by krymsin01 ( 700838 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @06:09AM (#10418957) Homepage Journal
    The movie the post is talking about is Final Cut (yeah, you'd know that if you RTFA...) Information from IMDB here [imdb.com].

    Synopsis from imdb:
    Omar Naim's The Final Cut is startlingly different than a conventional science fiction film. It's a compelling fable that offers a vision of a world where memory implants record all moments of a person's life. Post mortem, these memories are removed and edited by a "Cutter" into a reel depicting the life of the departed for a commemorative ceremony, called a Rememory. Robin Williams' powerful portrayal of Alan Hackman, a troubled "cutter," propels this character driven story that forces us to question the power of our memories and the sanctity of our privacy.
    • that forces us to question the power of our memories and the sanctity of our privacy.

      This isn't GATTACA. We're not talking about a technology that in twenty or thirty years could be developed into a heinous invasion of our lives here. Even if such a technology were possible, it's such a ridiculously advanced tech that we might as well not worry about it. It's about as relevant to our lives as Minority Report - that is, purely academic.

  • NEI (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @06:20AM (#10418983) Homepage Journal
    "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.

    • Re:NEI (Score:4, Insightful)

      by chewy_2000 ( 618148 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @06:29AM (#10419002)
      IANA satellite engineer, but apart from any encryption, would there be anything stopping someone with a reciever and the right gear grabbing, ripping and sharing this?
      I'm guessing the equipment wouldn't be entirely proprietary , and the protection could well be breakable (CSS..)

      • Re:NEI (Score:4, Interesting)

        by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @06:38AM (#10419018) Homepage Journal
        "IANA satellite engineer, but apart from any encryption, would there be anything stopping someone with a reciever and the right gear grabbing, ripping and sharing this?"

        Oops. Well, yeah, that's a good point. Unless they somehow focus the transmission at the particular theater that could be done. A.) they'd need a dish capable of recieving the data. I'm guessing that wouldn't be hard to build. B.) They'd need to know where to point it. C.) They'd need to know what to tune in on. and D.) They'd need some way of decoding the transmission.

        Err not trying to state the obvious here, but I'm just chewing on what you said. If it were the military, I'd say fat chance. But these guys are probably using off-the-shelf, so to speak, services. I doubt they launched their own satellite or wrote their own protocols etc. If I'm even partially right, then it's possible that some smart guy out there could catch the data and do something with it.

        I'd love to hear from somebody that can shed some light on this. I know virtually nothing about satellite technology.

        • Re:NEI (Score:5, Informative)

          by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 ) <john.oyler@noSpAm.comcast.net> on Sunday October 03, 2004 @07:03AM (#10419075) Journal
          A) This is easy, a 6ft dish is probably more than adequate, possibly as small as a 3ft primestar dish.
          B) This wouldn't be impossible to figure, there are only so many satellites. Check out lyngsat.com.
          C) Only 2 or 3 frequency bands (and this is almost certainly Ku). Only so many transponders per satellite (about 30).
          D) This part is tougher. Is it DVB, is it encrypted with Nagra or Digicipher II? Powervu, videoguard? I'm not even sure how you'd check...

          But I suspect this is much beefier than your standard over-compressed HD feed. I'm not sure I'd feel like preparing 500 gigs just to download such a movie.

          • Re:NEI (Score:5, Funny)

            by sploo22 ( 748838 ) <dwahler@gm a i l . c om> on Sunday October 03, 2004 @07:28AM (#10419135)
            D) This part is tougher. Is it DVB, is it encrypted with Nagra or Digicipher II? Powervu, videoguard? I'm not even sure how you'd check...

            Knowing the RIAA/MPAA's previous attempts at copy protection, my bet is ROT13.

          • Current hardware can transcode to DIVX in real time - but you wouldn't do that, you'd just do the resize to lower resolution (ie to about DVD resolution - less than 6 gig file).

            Then you could run the rest of the process at your leisure.
            • You may be underestimating the video format. Seems the digital version of ep1 was hundreds of gigs, raw pixels. And if its high res, and an unusual one, the hardware I could buy might not be able to transcode on the fly. But yeh, I'd like to try anyway...
              • I actually got to talk to a TI engineer after the screening of EP 1 (in Burbank.) If I remember correctly, they were running a highly redundant raid, with about 320 gb storage, to store a 2k image at 4:3 (they expanded to wide screen using an anamorphic lens on the projector, because the DLP chips were 4:3). The engineer said that if they had been able to trim a few dozen gb, they could have put everything on a tape...

          • Re:NEI (Score:2)

            by Cylix ( 55374 ) *
            Digicipher II seems to be the more popular one right now.

            Unlike DirecTV's DSS... I don't believe anyone has defeated it.

            Most likely, it's an existing installation, there are lots of people doing HD over satellite right now. It's probably as simple as plugging into one of the video out ports on the decoder.

            It's too much trouble... I'll just goto the theatre.

            • Re:NEI (Score:3, Interesting)

              by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 )
              For those not in the know, digicipher II is used in VoOM HD satellite, Motorola cable boxes, canada's Starchoice and the now unpopular american 4Dtv packages for big dishes. I just doubt its in use... it's geared towards conditional access.

              Even hidef just isn't beefy enough for a theatre, think 1080i scaled up to a 100ft screen. I'd bet money it's pretty close to a raw format, with custom encryption, though maybe a traditional DVB encoding, more likely some data standard. Probably closer to DirecWay than D
          • But I suspect this is much beefier than your standard over-compressed HD feed.

            Yeah, but your 500GB figure is incredibly over-the-top.

            They say in the story that it's not film-quality yet, just a stop-gap measure, so I suspect a little more than 1080 HDTV res.
            • Hardly, ep1 was hundreds of gigs. 1080i would give you half inch (bigger?) pixels. I just don't see that happening. I think theatre quality projectors are at least 3000 pixels wide.

        • Re:NEI (Score:4, Informative)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @07:28AM (#10419136) Journal
          At Farnborough '02 I saw Boeing demonstrating a system like this. They bought off-peak satellite bandwidth and did not stream in real time. As I recall, the movie was about 50GB in total (MPEG-2 compressed). Considering that several of Boeing's largest customers are military, I would consider it highly likely that they are using a fairly good grade of encryption. It's probably going to be a lot easier to take a copy of it once it's been downloaded and decrypted than while it's in the air.

          • Re:NEI (Score:5, Informative)

            by cei ( 107343 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @12:33PM (#10420754) Homepage Journal
            Back in May '02 [freep.com] Boeing satellites were used to send copies of Attack of the Clones for digital projection. I'm not sure where this weeks' article gets off saying that Final Cut is the first film to do this, unless they're claiming that 115 screens is the achievement here, and not the actual process of sending the files.
      • IANA satellite engineer, but apart from any encryption, would there be anything stopping someone with a reciever and the right gear grabbing, ripping and sharing this?
        What? Millions of credit card transactions are carried out safely and securely on the Internet every day! Encryption is the easy solution to this problem. They've probably already sent out the keys by registered mail (guessing).
    • Well said.

      There is only so much far you can go with technology, especially when there are easier ways of getting the job done.

      At some point or the other, pragmatism butts in.
    • Or someone on the inside could get it *BEFORE* it's sent out over the link - and before any watermarks or DRM are put in.

      I'm not saying it would be easy, but it's possible.

      • Re:NEI (Score:5, Interesting)

        by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @06:44AM (#10419035) Homepage Journal
        "Or someone on the inside could get it *BEFORE* it's sent out over the link - and before any watermarks or DRM are put in."

        Well, to be fair, that possibility exists in a broader proportion right now. Movies these days are edited digitally. I'm oversimplifying quite a bit here, but somebody at the movie studio could wander in, hit 'Export to AVI', and drum their fingers for a while. I can't say I've ever heard of that happening. (err.. well that rang a bell... wasn't somebody at ILM busted for something like that? Help?) It's not clear to me, and maybe I'm just naieve, that incidents like that would rise noticably in the event of satellite distribution.

        • Now rather than sending off the whole movie, someone can just export the key, download it along with everyone else, and decrypt, which is easier than getting the whole movie IMO.

    • They'd have to take the humungoid file and get it to a computer to transcode

      Not necessarily. The information I've seen put it at just over 1080p HDTV standards, so it wouldn't be too large to download.

      I would assume it's normal MPEG-2, just with encryption. Once the encryption is cracked, you just strip it away, and offer the perfect-quality MPEG-2 data.

      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.

      It ALWAYS ha

  • Why use a sattelite? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by broothal ( 186066 ) <christian@fabel.dk> on Sunday October 03, 2004 @06:26AM (#10418997) Homepage Journal
    "- 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.

    • Re:Why use a sattelite? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @06:38AM (#10419019)
      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.

    • Re:Why use a sattelite? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Florian Weimer ( 88405 ) <fw@deneb.enyo.de> on Sunday October 03, 2004 @07:01AM (#10419072) Homepage
      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.

      I think the basic idea is that the film is never stored completely inside the theatre, on any medium. If there's nothing to make a copy from, you can't copy it.

      General-purpose Internet is a bit too unreliable to work with just-in-time streaming, and extra-reliable Internet with guaranteed bandwith isn't exactly cheap.
      • And while you can "guarantee" bandwidth, you can't guarantee that someone won't plow through a fiber bundle or reload a router somewhere between you and the distribution source.

        I've seen a whole satellite go out only twice.
    • "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."

      In addition to another point made in response to your comment, I just wanted to add that what you suggest is an exploit away from being looted. If they'll sue a 65 year old Mac using granny for looking like she's downloading content, they're paranoid enough to not even look in that direction.

  • Cost effective? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Viceice ( 462967 )
    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.

    • Re:Cost effective? (Score:5, Informative)

      by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 ) <john.oyler@noSpAm.comcast.net> on Sunday October 03, 2004 @07:08AM (#10419091) Journal
      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.
    • Well, it's gonna be paid for by the promotional department, since it looks like a publicity stunt...

    • Re:Cost effective? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
      They don't need to launch any satellites. This kind of system works by buying unused bandwidth on existing satellites (for almost nothing). A single satellite can cover a whole country (or group of countries, depending on the satellite and the size of the countries). The cost at each cinema is the receiving equipment, and the cost of a satellite dish and decoder is negligible compared with the cost of a digital cinema setup. The data is not streamed live, since the cheap bandwidth is not reliable. It i
    • "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."

      I can't give you numbers. But I can give you something to chew on: They'd only need to send the film once. Even if the number described by your terms is mind boggling, at least it isn't a multiple of anything.

    • Cost of Ku Bandwidth (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kd3bj ( 733314 )
      Satellite systems have been used to distribute Usenet for many years. I know from that experience that you can get a decent chunk of Ku transponder bandwidth for low 5 figures US$. Especially if you are willing to accept conditional bandwidth. It costs a lot more if you need a guarantee of bandwidth uptime (as TV/Cable guys often do). Theater movies don't need to be sent in guaranteed real time, I would think. Anytime before Friday should do.

      If you are distributing a movie to a high 5-figure quantity of t

      • Distributors that refuse to switch to low-cost satellite/internet/fedex-optical-media systems would be forced into bankrupcy.

        This is stupid. You aren't considering the number of customers over which the cost is spread, nor the inital costs of the digital equipment, nor the cost of maintaining the digital equipment vs projectors, and much, much more.

        If you consider that the price of distribution is spread-out over many many thousands of tickets, then you come out with the difference only being a few cents

      • The crossover point between Ku-distributed content and terrestrial today is at the level of 20-30 receive sites.

        Of course, some movie theater locations may be much farther from a major terrestrial POP, and local loop can add up.

        Terrestrial costs are going down, but satellite modulation techniques are allowing more bits per hertz at the same time.

        I'm currently working on a 180 receive site system for MPEG-2 based television show file distribution. Satellite blows terrestrial away for this application.

  • Old news, new news (Score:5, Informative)

    by mrshowtime ( 562809 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @06:49AM (#10419044)
    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 :)

    • Re:Old news, new news (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "Even the much balyhooed MPEG2 encryption"

      There's no encryption in mpeg2. Maybe you're thinking of DVD CSS?
    • Can you link to some info about this teenager breaking the DVD encryption? Sounds like a cool story.
    • The problem is that even AMC admits their digital projection doesn't stack up to film.

      They also need QuadXGA or better projector resolutions to get as good fine detail than 35mm film projection currently gets, and the contrast ratio on the high lumen projectors simply isn't there yet, so black will still look slightly gray and not as black as film black.

      I don't think the average theater goer really cares that much about the back end ('cept for the IMAX projection gallery), they rarely see the film spools.
    • Winding 5 foot diameter spools of film through a projector seems almost caveman like :)

      So does cleaning DVDs/CDs, but that doesn't mean you can stop doing it any time soon. It doesn't mean the alternatives that are devoid of this annoying step are, overall, better.

      Minidiscs are a step-up, but they haven't replaced CDs for (2 or 3) good reasons.

  • As a side note... (Score:1, Informative)

    by thegoogler ( 792786 )
    96% of movies are downloaded through bittorrent(i dont remember where i saw this) so it would porbably be up on supernova, not on emule.

  • Not the 1st movie distributed via satellite (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Smartjog [smartjog.com] has already been distributing movies via satellite since at least 1 year.
  • 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.

    • It would only be a few people stealing the movies, rather than the viewing public.

      You underestimate the piratical capacity of peer-to-peer networks.

      • Just in the U.S.A., I wonder how many actually do the following: Download the theatrical release (which hasn't made it onto PPV or DVD yet), without eventually paying for it another way. By this I mean, those who download the theatrical release, but never buy the DVD, or pay for the PPV. Faulty logic I know.

  • System is using Linux (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 03, 2004 @08:17AM (#10419255)
    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.
    • I can: Qualcomms Digital Cinema Division [qualcomm.com] has developed proprietary high bandwidth compression algorithms (based on DCT) coupled with proprietary encryption that is decrypted on the projector. They have two modes of transport, the satellite system, and multiple DVDs (per film). They want to be the complete transport system of the industry. They are quite set up for this, but there's a business model problem.

      Movie theaters rarely pay for movie distribution. They pay for large projectors, but not the ~$
    • The article mentions a need for higher resolution. As I understand it, previous efforts were only 1280x720 or something else less than 1920x1080. I can't imagine getting better resolution on television than in the theater - that's just stupid. So does that NDA cover disclosing the resolution? How about the compression method?

      Actually it would be nice if someone ELSE could answer these questions so this guy doesn't need to worry about his NDA.

      • Qualcomm's decoder has a SMPTE-292M output, which is also known as HD-SDI, a serial digital interface with 1.485Gbps. It supports among others 1280x720 and 1920x1080 - the latter also in 24 frame progressive, which is better for film than the 60 field interlaced format used for ATSC HD broadcasts. Additionally it's 10 bit per component, and I think ATSC has just 8, so at least color space resolution is better. Due to interlacing use in TV, the spacial resolution should be better slightly as well (i think th
  • Heck, if it's going to an AMC theatre, the movie is already ON eMule!

    (Dunno about the USA, but in Canada, AMC only plays 2nd run movies)
  • I wonder which AMC theaters will have this. Also, it sounds like this will be a pure digitial movie so no dots, dirts, etc. :)

  • This is pretty sad :( (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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 (10240x76
    • Well, you better hope they don't use those Verbatim dual layer DVD writables...they only last a few years...20 at best. Actually stamping the DVDs would be MUCH better, but would cost a LOT more. Hopefully we are in an intermediate phase where we don't really have a good, high capacity, and permanent digital storage medium. Maybe in a few years there will be something a bit better for this.
    • "Better yet, use Verbatim dual layer DVD's with the film stored frame by frame as TIFF."

      Being slahsdot I thought we had to promote PNG? ;-)
  • The band Phish has held three concerts that were simulcast live into 50+ movie theatres around the U.S. I watched two of them myself, the audio and video quality were excellent. More info here [phish.com]

  • There is a larger battle here no one mentioned (Score:4, Informative)

    by John Sokol ( 109591 ) on Sunday October 03, 2004 @11:07AM (#10420160) Homepage Journal
    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 [videotechnology.com]
    http://www.videotechnology.com/old0904.html [videotechnology.com]
    http://www.videotechnology.com/old1004.html [videotechnology.com]
    http://www.videotechnology.com/old0804.html [videotechnology.com]
    http://www.videotechnology.com/old0604.html [videotechnology.com]
  • The caveat "major Hollywood movie" isn't much of an accomplishment. The independent film Evergreen [evergreenthemovie.com] used the exact same distribution method earlier this year. The movie, which appeared at Sundance, stars Bruce Davison--the senator from the X-Men movies--and Mary Kay Place.
  • I've seen some digital movies. Star Wars Ep 1 was in digital theaters, I saw another handful of movies in digital theaters, and I have to say, they look fine to my eyes. They do look jagged, however, sometimes during the credits when there are lines that should be straight diagonal lines, but are suffer from the basic diagonal line on a computer problems.

    The argument for digital theaters is that you don't have to transport film from point A to point B, so if Movie "X" is wildy popular, and Movie "Y" is a b
  • We did the first motion picture distribution using Loral Cyberstar in 1998. Here's the IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122143/news. Get your facts straight!
  • Wonder if this would improve on the distribution times between the US and England - they get US films much later than we do and vice versa.

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