Even with all of this onerous encryption and DRM, it's not hard to find pirated copies of movies. It makes me think that the sacrifice in ownership rights for the theaters over their equipment isn't worth it.
replies(7):
Piracy is inevitable, but in this case their model is much more robust that I would have predicted.
But it seems that more and more releases are straight-to-streaming, and/or sometimes simultaneous with the theatrical release. High-quality pirated copies often show up within a day of a streaming release. Sure, many are still theater-only for a week or more after initial release.
I get that a big part of their business model for some titles relies on theater ticket sales within the first days or at most weeks after release, but all this DRM just feels like an exhausting, expensive, ultimately-losing game for them. Especially when we consider how theater-going has declined over time, especially recently.
A 4k movie, even from a Blu-Ray, may look very nice when watched at a normal speed, but if you look at the individual frames in order to distinguish some details during a sequence with fast movements, the quality is very bad and it may be impossible to see the details that you want to see.
At the levels of compression that are typical for movies distributed by encoding with H.264, H.265 and the like, I have never seen any movie that still looks high quality when slowed down during fast action.
This is not a feature that requires professional tools.
And I do not think that you have to be a pro or a nerd in order to want to see clearly many of the details of the kind "blink and you miss it".
Pros before bros.
Nerds are just wannabes.
The mugglers may suffer as they do not know, care or can articulate it. If they do - they are clearly nerds and we can discard them as a minority.
People conflate pro with premium. The mass market should be able to sustain premium and discount. The market might be too small for pro DCP content. But I would like the market to understand that there are 3 important segments. Pro, premium and discount.
Pro - special specific needs. Premium - for the regular Joe who wants good quality. Discount - for the masses.
Premium market is underserved. Unless you are willing to pay luxury prices for Kaleidescape or the likes.
It is the race to the bottom with streaming providers testing commercials. They have already succeeded with the "junk content" as the big studios wants to keep licenses for their own services.
The quality bar is set for the lowest/cheapest common denominator.
> I have never seen any movie that still looks high quality when slowed down during fast action.
Then don't do this? No one does this. Theaters certainly don't offer this experience.