The Big [Censored] Theory

We have this kind of censorship in India as well, even the in weirdly innocous places. In James Bond movies, and I think Gone Girl as well, scenes were by zooming into character's faces or just straight cuts.

This is probably the only reason I maintain a US iTunes accounts (used to have to buy gift cards from sketchy sites online to keep this going, but I recently discovered that my Indian Amex card works fine with a US address).

Also trivia for those who are wondering how cuts are made, at least for cinema content: all video and audio assets are usually sent to theatres in full, but there's an XML file called the CPL (composition playlist) that specifies which file is played from which to which frame / timestamp in what sequence. Pure cuts or audio censorship can be handled by just adding an entry to skip the relevant frames or timestamp, or by specifying a censor beep as the audio track for a particular time range.

https://cinepedia.com/packaging/composition/

There is a home version of this called ClearPlay that auto-redacts movies and TV. It actually started with DVD players (!) but now does streaming.

Ref: https://amazon.clearplay.com/

My Mormon neighbors tend to use VidAngel, which got in huge trouble with an absolutely hilarious payment model.

1. VidAngel purchases a bunch of Blu-ray discs and stores them in a warehouse

2. Tag all the content of a film and create filters so the user can, for example, filter out all sex and violence but leave in vulgarity

3. User "purchases" a Blu-ray for $20 (!!) and VidAngel says, "since we now know you're the owner of this copy sitting in the warehouse, we'll stream it to you right now instead of going to the bother of mailing it out" (This part legally qualified as a "performance", which was their big mistake.)

4. When user is done watching the film, VidAngel automatically buys back the Blu-ray – still sitting in their warehouse – for $19.

So users could essentially stream any film they want (with optional self-selected censorship) for only $1 per viewing. Of course they get a flood of users since they're the cheapest shop in town, and of course since what they were doing was illegal they got taken to court and had to shut down 90% of their business.

And then, they wrote an endless tream of publicity saying, "Big media doesn't want to give you the right to skip nudity and violence in your own home! Think of the children! They want to force their values on you!" Yeah, I don't think the film-makers loved the censorship platform, but it was the $1 performances that really got them riled up.

Leaving aside the matter of Mormons and their weird puritan sensibilities, what this company essentially did was reinvent movie rental, but because they did it on the internet instead of a brick and mortar shop we're all expected to think it obvious and self evidence that what they did was horrible.

In other contexts on sites like this, "do [common thing] but on a computer" patents get mocked and derided because "but on a computer" is seen as a farce, not a fundamental difference from the [common thing].

Anyway, I guess the mormons could get around this and achieve their desired effect by instead selling DVD players with a subscription to a service that distributes EDL files; instructions to the DVD player about which parts of movies should be skipped.

While some Mormons may have "weird puritan" values, simply wanting censorship options for some movies is something that many families would like to have, not just Mormons. And I don't think it's necessarily puritan to want to cut out that one or two scenes of a head exploding in an otherwise family friendly flick.

I actually agree, but I got the sense that the company being mormon was meant to bias the reader of that comment towards thinking that the company was in the wrong. I hoped to drive the conversation past that prejudice by conceding and dismissing it rather than pushing back against it, because I felt that on this forum pushback would likely prompt a religious flamewar rather than a discussion about digital rental.

Using EDL files to edit movies for my family is something I've actually done before. I think a superfluous sex scene is okay in most contexts, but when watching a movie with parents/grandparents it's generally too cringe for me and everybody else in the room. I used mpv's EDL functionality for this: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/edl-mpv.r...