Cinesend

[Frank Cox]

Have any of your folks had any contact with Cinesend? It's an outfit that sends you the dcp's over the Internet; you get a box in your projection room and the movies get downloaded into that. You then ingest to your server from their box. They provide the box and all you pay for is your Internet connection.

Quote from the email:

That is correct there is no cost. There is no monthly or weekly service charge. There is no cost to download any content. We cover the cost of shipping the receiver, we cover any costs involved in maintenance. We charge the studio a rate each time they send content to you. The only cost you would have to worry about there is your internet, making sure you have the right speed and enough allowance each month. The only charge to consider is CineSend Trailers, which is an add on service to download trailers to your browser or CSX; it is free for 2020, and we're looking at a tiered payment structure in the new year, but it is not required.

cinema_hardware_header.png

Sounds like a pretty good deal....

[Steve Guttag]

We have one customer with it. The box gets an internet feed and they also connect to your "media network." It seems to behave like DCDC and other content via non-physical media boxes.

[Sean McKinnon]

I have customers with "eclair play" and spotlight which seem ti be similar things to this. They work fine AFAIK.

[Carsten Kurz]

One potential drawback could be that they don't offer the full catalog of titles, but work only with a small range of studios. In some areas of the world, the electronic distribution market is segmented into 4 or 5 different companies, each serving different titles/distributors. As a result, cinemas in these markets have to supply/care for a range of boxes, some only receiving a DCP once a year. You should probably ask them about this potential issue before you decide wether it's worth the electrical bill they create.

We use three different systems - two being PC based with a dedicated software client using our existing internet connection, the third, GOFILEX, with their own equipment, and connected to a dedicated cable internet they pay for as well. All three work nice enough, though GOFILEX with the dedicated hardware and line is the most trouble free. Three years back they wanted us even though we're a single screen.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Why is a separate box required for each system? It seems like a distributor can just provide a URL for where to pick up the movie. A local library server would go get it. It seems like it could even be done by the playback server. Once it's on one server, it can be shuttled around the theater as required.

[Frank Cox]

Apparently Landmark Cinemas of Canada (the second largest Canadian cinema chain after Cineplex) is putting one of these into all of their theatres. So it's probably wise for me to keep up with the Joneses and get one of these things installed. The "exhibitor relations" guy said that if I'm not expecting any content I can switch it off, so I suppose I have little to lose by getting one and setting it up and seeing what happens after that.

Now is the time to set it up when the theatre is closed; if it takes a couple of days of fooling around to get it to work then nothing's lost.

[Steve Guttag]

Harold, because each system is for a different content provider and each is responsible for their own box. To us as integrators...all we need to provide is a port on the "Media" switch for the TMS or the individual SMS servers to get to the content. Those boxes are not, typically, owned by the cinema.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Thanks Steve! But could they be standardized hardware and OS that runs wget or similar to just get stuff from a specified URL? Cinemas could buy whatever system hardware they wanted (or the software could be integrated into a TMS, LMS, or the playback server). File transfers are not magic. Why special hardware?

[Steve Guttag]

Because that is the service. I don't believe the theatre owners pay anything for the box...just the service. Most, I think, pay based on the content that they actually download/use. This puts all of the upkeep on the content provider, not the cinema. All the cinema has to provide is floor space and a port on the network switch. If they discontinue the service, then the unit is removed.

[Carsten Kurz]

Over here, we do not pay for any transfer towards the cinema (only for sending back hard discs). Of course, the costs for getting the content to us is still buried in the minimum guarantee we pay to the distributors.

Harold - these services do not use standard file transfer protocols. They seem to be ineffective and may require too many retransmits - minimum transfer entity for DCPs would be a reel, which is ineffective. With proprietary protocols, they can break it down into smaller blocks and perform integrity checking on that block level. Some of these protocols have been developed also with wonky satellite transfers in mind where you simply can not request a full reel again.
One favourite protocol is FASP/ASPERA. Usually, the cinema does not have to bother about details. You setup a client, they recognize you, and you are done. One of the software transfer services actually pay us some money for every transfer (basically, what they save against shipping a hard disc otherwise). One would think it is only a symbolic incentive. As it is up to the cinema to decide which of these services to book, getting around 5US$ per feature transfer is SOME incentive to use THAT service. Over the year, it pays our internet connection.

These software clients also support trailer downloads (all german - and I think all european cinemas now) download their trailers through the internet. Some of these services allow to shift their trailer downloads to this service, so, features and trailers come through the same client running in the background on one of our office PCs. We then ingest content through SMB or FTP. One small advantage of using the download service for trailers is that they come as one trailer DCP per folder unzipped - so you do not need to unzip them before ingest. These clients also perform a full verification/hash check on content once the transfer is complete.
These transfer protocols offer some handling benefits like e.g. Dropbox or GDrive - they keep fetching the content until it is complete and hash checked, even over multiple days and possible reboots. Once the transfer is complete, you get a confirmation email.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Thanks! I've used Aspera a few times to get test DCPs. I also used FTP to get a several hundred GB feature a couple months ago. I like the simplicity of transferring a single file (tar, zip, etc.). The file package should, in my opinion, be taken apart as late as possible, possibly at ingest by the playback server. From what I'm reading, FASP uses UDP for the transfer with minimal reverse channel information as compared to TCP. It appears it was optimized for high latency networks. It appears to be a proprietary protocol developed by Aspera/IBM. There is a pretty dramatic comparison between FASP and FTP at https://downloads.asperasoft.com/en/...p_versus_FTP_4 . There's a calculator at https://www.ibm.com/aspera/file-transfer-calculator/ . There's a large discussion of FASP at https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/commen...e_alternative/ .

It seems to me that you should be able to fetch a feature with a URL. It would show up as a single file that is extracted during ingest. I think the transfer should use standardized open protocols.

So, interesting stuff, but definitely outside my area of expertise!

[Elia Orselli]

In Italy we have two main services for DCP digital delivery: one via satellite internet connection which services most of the distributors and one (now Eclair) that can be via satellite or via fiber connection.
The satellite-only system is totally free of charge for the venue. Instead the Eclair box and a dedicated fiber connection are free, but you have to pay a fee for each DCP download.
Two other providers tried to start with their own services (one giving a refurbished PC as client, the other with a software that was linked to an AWS account), but they never sent a single DCP...

[Scott Jentsch]

One reminder is to check the terms of service with your internet provider for any download/bandwidth quotas that might be on your account.

Do the math on the average download size and the number of downloads per month and make sure you don't end up with a big bill for overages, being throttled for taking too much bandwidth, and angering anyone else that is on your same network connection (e.g. cable internet) if your downloads cause their service to go downhill.

[Frank Cox]

The box showed up today.

I'll drag it up into the projection room and see how far I can get with setting it up within the next couple of days....

[Marcel Birgelen]

Thanks Steve! But could they be standardized hardware and OS that runs wget or similar to just get stuff from a specified URL? Cinemas could buy whatever system hardware they wanted (or the software could be integrated into a TMS, LMS, or the playback server). File transfers are not magic. Why special hardware?

I like the idea of the integration into the TMS. It should be a bit more sophisticated than a "wget" though, you want block-based downloads and checksums, so if the transfer cuts out in the middle, you don't have to redo the entire thing. If they're smart, they'd employ something like the bit-torrent protocol (yeah, it's known from the piracy stuff, but like many things, it's just a tool that lends itself for a specific purpose), where every client also is a server. This could save those distributors a ton of bandwidth. Also, bit-torrent could even be an interesting protocol to distribute content between servers on your local network.