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.
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!
these are already thin profit margins, and its incredibly event-sensitive, like holidays. this sounds financially painful
Made even worse by Sony, the manufacturer, completely exiting that market. I wonder if/how Sony will fix this, are there even staff on hand there with the technical details for their projector’s DRM anymore?
It speaks volumes about how silly DRM is when a massive game publisher like TakeTwo/Rockstar resorts to selling a pirated version of their own game 🤦♂️
The next time this happens those projectors may end up being $20000 bricks, and I’m not too sure how many independents will be able to afford dumping a quarter of a million to replace all their projector screens
I’m not too sure how many independents will be able to afford dumping a quarter of a million to replace all their projector screens
Don’t worry, thanks to this amazing thing called capitalism a big chain will happily buy out those struggling independents at a fraction of their actual worth.
As always, DRM hurts the paying customers more than the pirates.
The marvels of intellectual property
I’ve avoided Sony products as best I can since then. I’m probably not aware of the full suite of Sony-owned brands and companies, but rootkit made it so I haven’t had a piece of Sony branded merchandise in almost 20 years.
Same here! It’s absolutely bonkers to me that everyone was just OK with that.
“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.
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.
Multiple theatres owned by one mother company / investor / whatever you get what I kean
Buy the rights for one location/franchise to run it then copy to your other locations to save cost
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”
