REDray for Movie Theater Distribution?

[Tom Lowe]

With the recent announcement that AMC theaters will be installing thousands of 4K projectors in their theaters, it makes me wonder whether REDray wouldn't be an ideal distribution method for movies theaters?

I mean, studios could literally Fedex out USB drives!

Another thing I wonder about: Could Red put out a "pro" REDray player, for example, for $5,000 that plays 4K at higher bitrates - in case the theaters insisted on more fidelity or whatever? I assume that if you doubled the bitrate, there would be some kind of gain in image quality? Or would the current REDray $1,000 player be enough?

 

[Craig Schober]

i think you're looking in a different direction than theater chains and studios are looking. they do not care about quality of presentation. 4k, 2k, whatever is just something to tell shareholders that they are still relevant. they do care about security and piracy. their priorities are completely backwards and antiquated so unless red can guarantee these usb drives or discs cannot be copied in any way, shape or form, they would never go for any distribution system like this.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Yes, security will be top priority. Very good point.

It's definitely complicated. If the studio system builds some type of proprietary codec and custom decoding machines, what's to stop someone from simply capturing the digital output that goes to the 4k projectors? Or cracking the codec's encryption?

I guess if they made some kind of custom, proprietary disc format (something similar in shape and size to laser disc, for example), that alone might stem some piracy, because the theater employees couldn't just take the disc home and rip it on their PC. Trying to protect the codec itself, though, is useless, because it will simply be cracked. I mean, look what happned to Bluray. They spent a fortune making Bluray "uncrackable" and two weeks later it was cracked.

So I guess the physical player/decoder is their only real chance to stem piracy. That would not stop REDray from being the codec.

 

[Thom Steinhoff]

As far as i know, digital movies are already delivered on cheap hard drives with major encryption and they already have locked down codecs and decoders.

With the extremely efficient Redray codec, however, it is far closer to being easier to just FTP the files on day of show and save the lead/load time and trouble of delivery.

With no need for physical intervention, they could also develop a closed loop that delivers the movies via the internet from the backend to SSDs, counts all of the plays, and deletes them at the end of the run--with no way for the local projectionists to get access to the files whatsoever.

 

[Tom Lowe]

As far as i know, digital movies are already delivered on cheap hard drives with major encryption and they already have locked down codecs and decoders.

If that is true, it seems like the codec's encryption would be easy to crack?

If you could simply copy the file from the harddrive, you could take it home and crack it, then encode to H264 and up it to the Pirate Bay.

There must be some type of proprietary hardware involved?

 

[Kenneth Elkington]

If that is true, it seems like the codec's encryption would be easy to crack?

If you can view it you can capture it. Heavily encrypted files sent over fiber/sattelite would be an ideal distributition method for theaters,a and redray could enable that.

 

[Stephen Gentle]

I think the best they can do is to just encrypt a DVD ISO with 256-bit AES encryption, and then the studio could decrypt that and burn it. Of course, it then becomes venerable to being stolen by theatre employees, but really, you have to accept that if you can get a picture out of any format, there has some way to copy it..

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I can see something like RED RAY replacing DCI at some point. There wouldn't have to be [much] local storage or FTP deliverables, etc.. At 10Mbps, it could be streamed and cached locally over heavily encrypted connections.

There will always be bootleg films floating around, but the majority of those will come from camcorders in the audience rather than direct interception of a 4K RED RAY (or similar) stream to a projector. It may also be possible to do a digital DNA or watermark that is unique for each point of distribution, so if a 4K original file does leak out, it wouldn't be too difficult to tell where it was leaked from. With fines and restrictions in place to and a digital fingerprint to identify leaked files, that would be good incentive for theaters to scrutinize their employees and maintain a decent level of security.

 

[Pawel Achtel]

Let's see... What is that independent film makers may wish for now?

How about Wavelet-based theatre internet distribution? Hosted by Red? Managed by Red Users?

Add Red Ray disc, good encryption and DRM and the playing field with major studios gets even more even.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Not that I really care, but I think that if I was hired to come up with a security scheme for digital distribution to theaters, I would insist on some kind of strange, very unique, proprietary hardware system for the media and "player." Perhaps some kind of very large, unusual holographic disc, similar in size to a vinyl LP or something, and only machines made for theaters could read them. Make it so that building a machine to read it would be a real bitch.

The software stuff is just too easy to crack. Hardware + software is best.

Maybe some entrepreneur can device such a piece of hardware and mate it to the REDray codec.

 

[Graeme Nattress]

Surely then Tom, the answer is to go back to laserdiscs, and put the audio on a vinyl record synced with the picture

Graeme

 

[Brad Webb]

What if...

Redray is streamed to the theaters. Since it only takes 10mbit/second, and this number could shrink in a few years time, Theaters can have a central Redray player stream out 4k movies to the theaters.

This would be win-win for theater chains as well as th studios. Security is easier with only a few people actually having access to the Redray and actual movie files.

 

[Tim Hole]

We get the drives delivered by courier service, same as the film prints and then a usb stick is delivered separately. The USB stick allows the film to be viewed. The film can only be played on that projector and no other. Plus it has a time lock on it.

Oh and yes we have been in a situation where we could not show the first screening of Monster Vs Aliens in 3D because we did not receive the USB stick in time. Caused a little issue...the four hundred or so angry children and parents...FUN!!!!

 

[Chris Kenny]

The solution to the piracy problem is fairly straightforward with theaters, and if I'm not mistaken I think it may already been in use.

The general flaw with digital rights management is that you're providing the "attacker" (AKA your customer) with the decryption key in some form. Otherwise they can't view the content, and while I'm sure the industry likes that concept of that, I think the focus grouping shows that making it impossible for consumers to view the DVDs they buy might reduce sales somewhat. (Can you tell I'm not entirely enthused with the way Hollywood treats its customers?)

Anyway, you still have that problem with theaters, except that you have a much smaller number of customers and you know exactly who they are. So the solution is digital watermarking, which these days can be invisible and nearly impossible to remove. If a film leaks from a theater onto the Internet, you'd know exactly what theater it came from. You would explain this to theater owners, and explain to them that if anything leaks from their theaters, they wouldn't get to show movies anymore. It then becomes their problem to manage internal physical security to make sure that doesn't happen.