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

[white_aster]

Good to know! Cripes. I mean...I support artists and such, I buy things legally, but when I've legally obtained something and the industry actively organizes things so that it is more inconvenient to use the thing I have legally obtained...that's where I get annoyed. If I buy something, I want it to work, without my player making me show ID and a blood test to prove I'm a legal owner. The movie/TV industry puts all these things in place, that risk voiding my ability to use my own property...and they don't even work. Can verify, piracy is still a thing, copies are still readily available. They can play whackamole with specific avenues all they want, but it's never going to be enough. And ironically, their increased desire to make it more difficult/expensive for people to access things legally just makes it more likely that they'll go find the very easy pirated copies instead.

:grumps: :is old person, yells at cloud:

[thewayne]

There's a very funny movie by Joe Dante called Amazon Women on the Moon.  It's a collection of shorts with a couple of recurring themes.  One of the shorts is called, IIRC, Video Pirates.  And it's swashbuckling 18th century pirates who capture another sailing ship loaded with the latest video releases.  They pop a VHS tape into a player (it's an old movie now) and the FBI warning comes up and the pirate captain goes "Oooh!  I'm so scared!" with some very nice quavery voice acting, and the crew erupts in laughter.  This movie had some amazing talent and clever stuff in it.

[white_aster]

Heh heh, classic!