Cinesend

[Mike Blakesley]

I emailed our booker about Cinesend. He had one of their staff contact them. The response was that they are concentrating on the Canadian market first but are planning expansion into the U.S., and in fact their system IS available in the US now, but none are installed here yet because they just havent really pulled the trigger. Currently they are only lined up with Disney and Universal, but that's about 60% of the mainstream movies. I expect they're holding off until they sign another major or two.

[Steve Guttag]

I have one site (in the USA but not a commercial cinema) that has a Cinesend server already.

[Barry Floyd]

"Many of my customers use DCDC and never have problems, but singles and twins can not get it, because DCDC says they don't have enough downloads in a year to make any $$$."

We've got DCDC at our twin screen drive-in. Since we play double features, maybe we do have enough downloads to make it financially viable for them. Had it almost 2 years now.

[Mike Blakesley]

I bet that's the case.... the double features.

They sent me a single email saying that we don't have enough "turns" to have it make sense for them to work with us. I wrote back and said we'd be willing to pay for the service and I also asked how many "turns" we needed to have to qualify. They did not answer my email, so I wrote again a while later and again they didn't answer.

I've been meaning to get on the phone with them but I hate calling people, and have a feeling that we'd get a similar dismissive attitude on the phone anyway. My wife has volunteered to call them and she's much better at dealing with people on the phone than I am, so maybe she'll be more successful than I was.

[Marcel Birgelen]

This DCDC model is quite a strange model. Since they broadcast stuff over satellite, it doesn't cost them one dime more or less in bandwidth, no matter how many receivers there are. This is unlike a service that works over the Internet, where every download counts towards your usage total. Yet, they seemingly based their model on how many DCPs you actually receive per month.

You'd say they base their pricing model more on a monthly rental and service fee for the hardware and a service fee for the downlink services they offer... But I guess their business model is that those multiplexes pay them more, for essentially the same service...

[Brad Sime]

It's my understanding that Cinesend charges you if they send you trailers. Features are free.

At least that's what I was told when I got it.

Hey Frank I just got one of these. Is the Cinesend unit plugged directly into your projector? Both of the ethernet ports on ours are occupied, and I'm a little stuck as to where to plug this thing in.

[Carsten Kurz]

Well, you need a Gigabit-Switch to connect more than two devices to your content network. They don't cost much, from 20-30US$ up for basic devices, and every computer store offers them.

[Brad Sime]

So I'd connect the CSX to the gigabit switch, and then connect the gigabit switch to the SR-1000?

[Frank Cox]

Exactly right. After plugging the device into the gigabit switch you'll then have to set the Cinesend device up as a Content Source on your SR1000. To accomplish that you'll need to know the IP address of the Cinesend device which the guy from Cinesend who logs into it after you tell him it's plugged in will provide for you. That's very easy to do as well -- let me know if you need help with it and I'll give you the exact instructions for how to do that.

Here are a few other things that I've learned about using a Cinesend, both stuff that I've discovered myself and that the Cinesend guys have told me:

1. When logged into the Cinesend Venue Login webpage, you can click on your name at the top right, then Theatre Name-Settings to see your current file transfer speed.
2. Sometimes jobs will sit at "triggered" if the machine misses the notification that they're finished. You can just click the three dots to the right of the job and select "Clear Job" to remove them from the list. In the rare case where something unusual happened and the delete didn't finish, this will let you "re-delete" the file, which usually
   solves everything. The three dots show up with Chrome but not with Firefox for reasons that I don't understand. (This won't make much sense until you've seen how it works yourself, but basically if you have a pending job that's still pending a day or a week later, then you'll probably want to retrigger the job or delete the job. Otherwise it will just sit there as pending forever.)
3. There's a ~500GB chunk of the hard drive that's reserved for system use - so it will always show as "used" so that the media library can't overwrite it by mistake.
4. If you go to your "settings" page (as in note 1 here), there's an item called "Stranded Assets". This is partially downloaded files when you stop a download mid-way (or if, say, your connection drops out) so they can be resumed in the future without having to start downloading from the beginning. There's a button there to delete them if you don't need them any more.
5. If you have a computer that's on the same network as your Cinesend device (either the one that's connected to your router or the one that's connected to your server) you can view the files on it by logging into it with ftp using the same username and password that you used when you set up the device as a Content Source.