From the article:
When we went to our seats, the wait staff let us know that despite the fact that the previews were playing, we wouldn’t know until the movie actually started whether we could see the film or not. If it didn’t work, the screen would just turn black. Luckily, the film went through without a hitch.
That's 2Password2Remember, they sign off every comment that way. It's surprisingly relevant a lot of the time, though: America has had an almost unrivaled hand in shaping the economic landscape of Japan, from the San Francisco Treaty to the Plaza Accords
You joke, but Japan hasn't even been allowed to have their own military since WWII. They barely are a separate nation.
"Death to America" is like our version of "and peace be with you." It's a nice phrase to say at the end of every statement.
Hilariously enough, even at the theater, you'd get a better experience pirating the movie. Y'know, cause you'd ACTUALLY GET TO WATCH THE MOVIE AT ALL. Proving yet again piracy is a service problem.
1st Jan? Smells like an expired certificate somewhere in whatever chain of DRM bullshit they use.
Pay attention boys and girls, this is also what they want to do with over the air broadcasts with the ATSC 3.0 format.
I also assume it's an expired certificate.
See, this is what happens when certificates are not renewed automatically.
The article says the projectos are discontinued. That's probably the reason no one is monitoring these certs.
Another glorious benefit of DRM.
I work at a movie theater and while we don't use Sony projectors, we were told to check all of our certificates to prevent this from happening. This sounds like a communication issue to me. Someone didn't do their job in time. Also in the article it says they wouldn't know if the film would work until it actually played. If that is either an outright lie or the equipment is designed horribly. On the projectors we use which are going on a decade old, the playlist won't even start if it can't verify that all of the content is playable and unlocked. We can see when our certificates expire as well so if all of these certificates expired at the beginning of the year. The theater should have already caught that and had the certificates reissued. Keeping in mind that this wasn't some sort of bug or glitch that nobody could have predicted, then disregard everything I said. DRM on movie theater. Projectors is an industry standard and all companies use it, not just Sony. Until the actual reason comes out, it's hard to say. If it's the certificates of the projectors themselves and not the movie keys which are two different things then yeah I could see how nobody knew what was going on. Especially if the projectors are discontinued. I do know that if our servers lose power and the CMOS battery goes dead, they will internally destroy themselves and never function again. This is to prevent piracy I assume.
or the equipment os designed horribly
I find this entirely believable. There's a LOT of equipment out there designed for profit over user experience.
But you're right, it's not really worth speculating over.
Curious about something, maybe you know since you work at a theater. I seem to remember hearing that a theater has to pay royalties each time they show a movie and that newer technology can track and report this automatically. Does the latest technology automatically track this as I recall? And if so, would playing a movie as a test count as a showing?
While this certainly may be possible, I don't think it's tracked to that degree. Theaters pay to lease a film and the studio decides if there are special rules for being shown. Some smaller known movies have deals with the theaters to show the film at a very low cost in order to get people to watch it. On the first weekend most of the ticket profit goes to the studios and then every week the profit to the studios gets lower and the theaters get more of that money depending on what was agreed on. Some movies like the Taylor Swift concert film could only be shown after 12:00 p.m. and only Thursday through Sunday for example. Say there was a busy night and we sold out of a show, we could cancel a different show and play that sold out movie in another auditorium to fit more people in. This is fine for most studios except for Disney, if Disney finds out that you cancel one of their films to show a different film, they will not be happy. As far as I know we can show movies and definitely as long as we have the keys active for them and I don't think the specific amount of time is reported back to the studios, we are just required to play it a minimum amount of times.
I mean, my home is filled with ancient laptops that we use until they explode, its a pretty common occurrence when trying to watch something streaming the ads would load just fine but the actual show wouldn't actually load. So... shrug
Not familiar with cinema projectors, but as I have gatherered from this forum problem is caused by KDM (used to decrypt movie) provider / reseller called Deluxe. Neither Sony or this cinema chain is at fault and problem indeed seems worldwide.
I do know that if our servers lose power and the CMOS battery goes dead, they will internally destroy themselves and never function again. This is to prevent piracy I assume.
Find it very hard to believe to be honest. Could this be simply some rumour from colleagues? Doubt any vendor would implement anything like this, drives could be simply encrypted to protect data if they ever get stolen.
Yes, I deal with KDMs weekly but I'm not for sure if this issue was KDM related or if it was certificate related. As for the service destroying themselves, I've never personally seen it happen, but I've been told by upper management that they've seen it happen twice. I don't really have any way to verify the information but it wouldn't surprise me and I don't see why anyone would make that up unless they really don't want people messing with it, but it seems like such an unlikely scenario.
I've seen very few leaks of digital prints intended to play in theaters on torrent sites. Either this DRM is unusually effective or pretty much unnecessary.
80% certain it's DRM to stop theatre owners from pirating it between each other and not to stop the public from having those copies
Come to think of it there's probably something to make sure theaters are completing the number of contractually obligated screenings too. Like a 3 person screening is probably a loss for the theater, but not revenue distributers want to lose out on.
Yes, the amount of showings that a theater has is tracked. Certain movies are contractually obligated to show at certain times or a certain number of times a day.
The staff commented "we can only know if it works when the movie starts", and this sentence is let me thinking "expensive royalties would be automatically paid every single time the play button is pressed"
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Sony is having issues with their projectors that is preventing us from being able to project movies at some of our theaters today.”
As New Year’s Day is a holiday, we somewhat understandably haven’t yet been able to reach Alamo or Sony spokespeople, and not every theater or every screening was affected.
That didn’t stop Alamo from blaming its Sony projectors for what at least one theater called a “nationwide” outage, however.
“Due to nation-wide technical difficulties with Sony, we aren’t able to play any titles today,” read part of a taped paper sign hanging inside a Woodbury, Minnesota location.
I’ve seen speculation on Reddit that it may have something to do with expired digital certificates used to unlock encrypted films, but we haven’t heard that from Alamo or Sony.
Sony reportedly exited the digital cinema projector business in 2020; all of the company’s existing models are listed as discontinued.
The original article contains 257 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 42%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I worked as a projectionist in 2009 when the cinema got its first digital projector in order to be able to show Avatar in 3D. At the start of the movie no one actually knew if it would work. Due to the movie being encrypted - with every cinema in Germany waiting eagerly for the password - No cinema was able to play the movie. But everywhere cinemas were packed with people. Because of fuckups somewhere in this incredibly stupid system the movie was delayed about half an hour (IIRC) nationwide. With no-one knowing if it would eventually work - especially nice for the people working at the cinema having to deal with angry audience members.
At the same time the 2D 35mm film-version we also had started without any problems (it was massive and pretty dicey to carry it around).
