How encryption for Cinema Movies works

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.

There is essentially zero piracy from these digital cinema releases. The pirate copies are generally from once it starts digitally streaming on one of the services including PPV, and when pirate copies exist earlier it is almost always someone with a camera in a theatre making a terrible quality screener.

Piracy is inevitable, but in this case their model is much more robust that I would have predicted.

Most importantly, the industry concerns itself primarily with the new-release window; that high fidelity copies will eventually be widely available doesn't break the model.

I suppose this would help keep pirated copies from getting out before the theatrical release date (presumably theaters are given these digital releases at least days before their first projection date).

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.

There are no high quality pirated versions though. The streaming version and even blu-ray is compressed way heavier than these DCP files. I’d buy these cinema versions of films in a heartbeat if they were availble.

1080p/4k as encoded by the streaming sites / blu-ray is sufficiently high quality for virtually all of the viewing public. You're weird (no offense).

As someone who's been working with cinema and video mastering, it sounds like you haven't seen the difference between professional formats like DCP and consumer formats viewed on a proper screen or projector. There's a reason we still have cinemas after all.

Even consumer equipment benefits greatly from visually lossless encoded media.

No one goes to the theater because the picture is better. It often isn’t.

Projectors aren’t maintained, or set up correctly, and audio balancing is often way off. People go to the movies to see new releases or have dedicated shared experiences