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]

I'm the same way: I dread the point where my TV dies, as there are so few models that DON'T have smart capabilities that you can't really control nowadays. And there seems to be this bad tendency to make everything internet connected/have an app when it really, really doesn't need to. I just want to turn my tech on and have it work, quietly, doing absolutely nothing that I didn't specifically tell it to do!

[thewayne]

Last year or the year before, LG posted that they made more money on the consumer info that they gathered and sold FROM their TVs than from the TVs THEMSELVES!  Yeah, this homie don't play that game!  You can still find dumb TVs, it also wouldn't take much work to plug a TV into a router so that it sees it is connected, then tell the router to block that address from any access.  Apple - at least as claimed - does not sell user/usage information to third parties.  Compared to Google whose sole business is an advertising enabler.

[white_aster]

>LG posted that they made more money on the consumer info that they gathered and sold FROM their TVs than from the TVs THEMSELVES!
I am not surprised. >_