Looks like DRM prevented to watch movies in many theaters yesterday

The marvels of intellectual property

1st Jan? Smells like an expired certificate somewhere in whatever chain of DRM bullshit they use.

these are already thin profit margins, and its incredibly event-sensitive, like holidays. this sounds financially painful

watch a literal half hour of ads and then maybe, if you're very lucky, you get to watch the movie you paid for.

Pay attention boys and girls, this is also what they want to do with over the air broadcasts with the ATSC 3.0 format.

The way we murder DRM is by it affecting the business bottom line.

This might be an offense worthy of litigation if Sony is not sufficiently contrite.

It's telling how unfriendly the DRM is, that it doesn't inform the protectionist of problems until the minute the show starts.

Sony is a real dick.

I've built DCPs (Digital Cinema Package, the format that protectors use) and the DRM part is always so finicky. I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.

If only there was a technology that allowed theaters to play movies in an analogue manner that they were in 100% control of. That would be cool. Why hasn’t that ever been invented?

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.

"Sony is having trouble with their projectors"

Why not call it out for the bullshit that it is? "Sorry, but greedy bullshit capitalism has failed you as a customer. The lockouts they've put on their media to punish the honest users is doing its job once again to punish you. We sure hope this doesn't lead you to find alternative ways to enjoy media without all of the DRM lockouts and garbage to punish you."

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.

Fuck them. Alamo Drafthouse is a bad company who got bought out by a hedge fund. They treated their employees like they're slaves. They used to make people clock out to clean the public bathrooms and theaters. Their justification "you get tips".

All the food is gross and handled by the most subservient drug addicts or drunks they can find.

They replaced a lot of experienced management with fresh grad students who had no culinary experience and the blame was shifted to the back of house staff.

If you ate at any of them you probably ate stuff that fell on the floor because since the wait staff is afraid of both the management and the customer they'd take it out on the cooks who give free floor seasoning to impatient people when accidents happen.

I saw a cook impale their foot with a knife, the manager make fun of them, they rinse the knife, sanitize it in dish, and they chop up mushrooms with it. I reported it to the health inspector and my car's windshield happened to get busted when the camera didn't work.

What happened to this little new invention called filmreels?

Someone forgot to tip Sony 20% for providing them with DRM

Is there any reasonable level of IP protection/DRM which may be employed by movie studios?

Should all films have simultaneous worldwide cross-platform releases, never theater only? If not, it seems some kind of defenses on the high-quality digital files for theaters would be a rare case where DRM seems somewhat justifiable… assuming it’s robust (beyond mergers/closures of the provider), and consumers never have to think about it.

Would love to hear arguments both for and against any protection schemes for any film ever.

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'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.

Curious how I’m supposed to pirate the theater experience.

This doesn’t really seem like a problem that piracy can solve.

Reminds me of how many times outages to corporate software has been caused by some bullshit with the licensing management.

Screw the movie theatres anyway.. Here in Australia, there are two big ones (Hoyts and Village), and both screw patrons by doing things like charging patrons extra money for booking online.

In fact, they ruined every joke in the simpsons movie for me (except one) by allowing ads to use clips from the movie. By 45mins of ads, every joke was ruined.

I really wish the big theatres here would f off, and get replaced entirely by small ones. I don't pay for 40mins of sh***y coca cola ads.

I no longer go at all. It's not a good experience, and its not even a good place to take a date

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).

As always, DRM hurts the paying customers more than the pirates.

This is without a doubt the dumbest timeline