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September 11, 2007
Cinea to no longer power BAFTA screeners
In an email sent out to all BAFTA Film Voting members yesterday it was announced that Cinea, the DRM division of Dolby, will no longer be supporting the film awards by providing free-of-charge DVD players and supporting them.
Feature film screeners, sent in the lead up to voting for awards like BAFTA and the Oscars, are an interesting kettle of fish for distributors. Recognised as a practical way of getting voters to eyeball your film, the cost of distributing these titles "safely" has come with mounting trust issues. Its impossible to pretend that a Hollywood blockbuster is anything other than a couple of gigabytes of data when it arrives in the post ahead of release. As a brand promotion I hope Cinea got some value from the scheme it ran for two years. How anyone could have classed this as secure is beyond me. In my re-mixable film studio the Cinea player was frequently used as the source for capturing video, though of course not with any copyright material, simply by connecting outputs to another recording device.
I viewed the arrival of the Cinea player in my home as a sign of the escalating arms race between content makers, consumers and pirates. As with the Cold War, its hard to see things slowing down although this announcement gives us some pause for thought.
Various titles last year used functionality of the S-View encryption to 'time out' the films after a few months - rendering them useless coasters. At least one title (Munich) failed to work completely and several others only played on the Cinea hardware with persistent efforts. How this impacted overall voting habits remains to be analysed. Start-up screens requesting PIN codes and requiring regular software upgrades to play new titles were, unfortunately, a taste of things to come.
Screener schemes have also come under scrutiny as a resource for pirates. Ironically, in a study published by Wired Magazine last year, looking at the P2P 'trajectory' of several high profile movies, the release of films into the wild appears to be happening much prior to the release of screeners. Film-makers trusting other film-makers may just be a necessary evil.
Posted by .M. at September 11, 2007 09:01 AM
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