ODS piracy - or, How much does Arts Alliance care about Copyright Protection?

When it comes to ODS piracy, it seems that some people are just too dumb to learn from past mistakes. Or maybe they don't think that protecting the intellectual property of alternative content is as important as that of regular Hollywood films.

I can find no other explanation for why the recent alternative content screening of The Who's 'Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who', including a live Q&A with the band's surviving members appears to have been transmitted UN-ENCRYPTED over satellite, just as the recent Genesis concert was also transmitted free for anyone with a dish a receiver to download recently.

With the revival and re-formation of vintage rock bands like Led Zeppelin and The Police, the level of interest in the special screening of 'Amazing Journey: the Story of The Who' was always going to be high, particularly as the survivors of the band were introducing the film and giving a live Q&A discussion afterwards. Tickets were selling well despite the relatively high price of £12.50.

Below is how Odeon, who was the exclusive exhibitor partner in the UK, described it on their website.

The high profile event received a lot of publicity, such as this article from UK music magazine Uncut, describing the evening:

The capacity audience included members of Keith Moon and John Entwistle’s families as Daltrey and Townshend answered fan questions put to them by Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson.

Also taking part in the Q&A session that was webcast to 16 countries worldwide, were Amazing Journey's director Paul Crowder and producer Nigel Sinclair, whose Spitfire Productions also worked on Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan doc, No Direction Home.

The event was organized by Arts Alliance Media (AAM), who were so proud of what they were doing that they put out a press release to mark the event. From it we learn that:

Making the event possible is Arts Alliance Media, who have maximised the ODEON digital projection infrastructure to bring this star-studded event live via satellite from the ODEON Kensington to 14 cinema venues across the UK, as well as MEC Vienna, Austria and UCI/Kinowelt Dusseldorf, Germany.

Paul Chesney, AAM’s Director of Business Development added, “This kind of alternative content helps cinema owners to attract a broader audience, whilst bringing people back to the cinema. Music events are ideal for broadcast at exhibition locations and we are delighted to be working with Universal and Odeon on this prestigious occasion.”

There's just one thing that AAM forgot in the hoopla of beaming this out to the world, which is that if you transmit valuable content you make damn sure you keep it safe. In the case of satellite you encrypt (scramble) the content, so that it can't just be picked up by anyone pointing their satellite dish at the skies. Or did Arts Alliance and their OB/satellite partner think that nobody would anticipate which 'bird' it would be sent over? Given all the advance publicity for the event, it was not difficult for amateur satellite enthusiasts to find it.

For full details, all you had to do was to log onto the discussion forum of German home-cinema website Beisammen.de and follow the thread called Live aus London in HDTV: Weltpremiere "The Who"-Dokumentation (05.11.) (You don't even need to speak German to work out what that means.) Here is what poster 'HD-Freak' had to say about it:

Das hat man selten: Live aus London ist jetzt die Weltpremiere des neuen Doku-Films über "The Who" zu sehen. In HDTV, 720p

Thor 1°West, 11486V; 13333, DVB-S!

Nicht zu fassen! Da sagt man den Kino-Besuchern bei der Begrüßung noch, sie könnten danach die DVD kaufen und jetzt zeigen die den Film in HDTV! Herrlich!

As the poster notes, there's no small irony in telling the audience members who have just paid £12.50 that they can buy the (standard definition) DVD on the way out when the 720p HDTV 5.1 surround sound transmission is available for free for anyone to capture off satellite to keep, share and re-distribute.

Scroll down and you find out that this was a world premier and that the DVD will not even be available on Germany until 7 December. But true German The Who fan's won't have to wait that long because the film is already available on peer-to-peer websites such as this one:


Although I'm guessing that this is a DVD rip, it is only a matter of time before the 720p HD version finds its way onto the net because some one somewhere recorded it off satellite, because the people responsible for organizing this event either didn't care or decided to ignore the danger that sending content un-encrypted entailed.

If I was Odeon or Universal Pictures I would be hopping mad, as this is content that their customers are expected to pay good money for (£24.99 full price for the 2-disc DVD, to be precise). There is also no small irony in the fact that AAM has signed a VPF deal with Universal, which would entail it distributing heavily encrypted DCPs of the latest Universal films, it appears not to have taken the most basic of precautions in sending a high def version of a Universal Pictures ODS ('other digital stuff') event to cinemas all over Europe. So much for these type of events "bringing people back to the cinema."

I have become particularly sensitive to the issues of protecting sensitive content when transmitting it over satellite, most recently as a result of the trials that the NORDIC 2.0 project has been conducting with Telenor Satellite Broadcasting. But more about that another time.

Thanks are due to my Inside Man who alerted me to this, but who shall remain nameless so as to protect him from the fall out that this ought to cause.