I was there!

No. That is the word. It’s not a buzzword. It’s a statement.

GE has garbage company for a very long time. It’s a shell of its former self. If I’m paying for a product I am going to do whatever I want with it because it’s my money. And if a company has a problem with that, it sounds like the company needs to fix it on their end. If it’s possible to create a plugin that cost your company millions of dollars is obviously you’re not running your company properly.

After reading the article, it looks like the studios want the IPs to show that Frontier is allowing piracy on their ISP and they claim they don’t want it for financial compensation.

Unfortunately it comes down to people thinking for themselves and that seems to be an issue. You can tell someone that it won’t help them as much as you want, but if they’re dead set on believing that it will then what can you do??

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.

Thursday nights were an event for sure. Building up new movies, breaking down the old ones.

35mm was a whole thing and while I miss the nostalgia, I certainly don’t miss the upkeep and the problems with film. Digital is so much easier. I feel the biggest issue with digital is if a problem goes wrong, there’s really not much you can do outside of standard problem fixes. If it’s an internal issue. You’re just screwed until the technician can fix it.

I guess if someone really wanted to they could even with the DRM but the DRM just makes it more difficult.

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.

Yes I’m aware but if the DRM wasn’t there it would certainly be easier

Someone working in a movie theater could just take the file and send it to other movie theaters and then they can play the movie whenever they want without paying the distributor. They could also just upload it onto the internet so anyone can watch it. It’s essentially to keep theater operators honest.

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.

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.

Unfortunate that society punishes those that can do things that a lot of people don’t understand