Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters suffers outage on New Year's Eve due to IT stupidity

[thewayne]

Alamo suffered outages at four theaters, two in the NYC area, plus Denver and San Francisco They blamed Sony projectors, which is curious as Sony exited the movie theater projector business in 2020: you'd think that Alamo would have phased them out and replaced them since they would have represented a severe service liability if they were to break.

At any rate, the problem seemed to be computer security/encryption certificates tied to the movies they were showing. Not all movies were affected. The distributor was scrambling to recreate certificates with longer expiration dates and - however they go about it - 'reprint' and re-issue the movies to the theaters.

The movies are shipped as encrypted files, then the certificates are needed to decrypt them. The certificate ties into the projector so the file decrypts as it is being played. DVDs and Bluray players do the same things, that's why you sometimes need to do an update to your Bluray player to play the latest titles: certificates have been updated and your old certs won't decrypt the newest stuff.

Apparently all was well on New Year's Day.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/1/24021915/alamo-drafthouse-outage-sony-projector

Comments

[silveradept]

Yep. Buy the media, then rip the media and keep it safe somewhere. Then you have your own digital copy to use as you would like.

(For a short amount of time, physical media used to have digital copies with various web stores. Wonder if they've all gone out of business at this point.)

[thewayne]

A lot of physical media still have digital versions provided, don't ask me why but people still like watching movies on phones and portable devices.

[silveradept]

Yeah, but they're all probably the kind that are "it's a digital copy with this specific service, invested with DRM so it will only work, and you only have access to it as long as this service stays in existence, so good luck having it still at your fingertips in the next three years!"

[thewayne]

Yeah, that is the kicker.  Your digital copy is streamed.  Maybe there's an offline viewing option for watching on an airplane, but I've never looked into it.

[silveradept]

They do exist, but it's very much "you download it to your device and okay it in our app only because otherwise, the DRM doesn't decrypt and you get to stare at the encryption company logo for hours on end."