Question about Cinesend

[Brad Sime]

I’m the projectionist for an one-screen arthouse/non-profit theatre. CineSend is always on us to get one of their devices, but I’m curious as to the benefits, as we rarely/never show first run films. Is CineSend a sensible idea for us, or no?

[Greg Routenburg]

The way CineSend's platform works, there's no cost to you for the installation of the equipment outside of any cabling or infrastructure costs to put their device on your network. The way their platform works, it doesn't matter if you're first or second run. They deliver content in an on-demand basis as it's booked through the various distributors and the distributors pay the delivery fee on their network. At some point down the road, if you want to subscribe to their trailer service, you will be able to pay then to download trailers directly to your CineSend device. You'll need to evaluate whether that's worth while to you or not. At the very least, having their server in place will save you the courier fees to return drives when you receive content on their system. I've installed 10 of them across our locations so far and had a very good experience with them. It's especially nice in our locations that routinely deliver by Fedex as courier deliveries have become very unreliable as of late.

[Frank Cox]

I've got one and have downloaded a movie using it on two occasions so far. The price is right (they gave me the gadget for free and even paid the freight to get it to me) and when it's not in use I just turn it off. They send me an email when they have new content for me so I go and turn it on for the night and the next morning my movie is here.

The only thing that it's cost me is a couple of hours of my time to get it screwed into the rack and hooked up to the network.

So far it's saved me two $50 freight bills and it also gives the distributors another way to get a movie to you if they want to use that instead of a courier service. So what's not to like?

[Leo Enticknap]

Interesting. Their business model appears to be to grow the number of sites able to receive content using their system as quickly and as aggressively as possible, by giving the equipment away, in order to make their infrastructure an attractive proposition for distributors: no more faffing about with hard drives, dealing with the sort of problem that Peter Foyster reported, etc. etc. I wonder if EclairPlay (the other major DCP delivery over IP system that I'm aware of) is doing the same thing.

The main problem with DCP delivery over IP is that in the USA at least, the major studios won't touch it, citing security concerns: for major studio content, your two options are CRU drives on a truck, or Deluxe Technicolor's satellite system. I wonder if Cinesend's approach is to grow the number of sites that have their boxes to the point at which their offer is too attractive for the big boys to ignore, or if they see a sufficient market in arthouse and indie titles alone.

[Steve Guttag]

Aren't the studios delivering 1st run content to people's homes (where they'd never copy it) via things like the internet?

[Leo Enticknap]

Yes, and using much weaker encryption than is applied to studio DCPs. I'm not convinced that security is actually the reason why the DCP over IP startups are currently not able to handle big studio content, only that this has been claimed.

[Pete Naples]

DCP Delivery is very much a thing here and Europe. Lansat is the leader AFAIK. They recently purchased Gofilex and integrated the two systems.

[Carsten Kurz]

We saw a considerbale boost in electronic/IP based delivery starting with the Covid-19 crisis. When we started with Gofilex in 2015, only some few DCPs were delivered through them. Over time, more and more distributors signed with them. We now receive DCPs disk based in so small numbers as we received them through broadband/IP in 2015.

Most of the few remaining distributors/studios that had not signed contracts with Gofilex seem to have done so during the last year. There is a second successful service in germany/part of europe. They (Cinepost) and Gofilex split the market here between them. Aside from some few issues at the very beginning, both never caused issues with delivery. Both also offer trailer downloads. Satellite delivery in germany (and probably all of europe) is dead. Those still operating their satellite equipment only use it for live/alternative content. They say it has been years now that they received a DCP through their dish.

- Carsten

[Harold Hallikainen]

I'm still not seeing why each Internet distributor is putting hardware in the theaters. It SEEMS like this could be a standard protocol implemented in the TMS, LMS, or auditorium server. A movie distributor would just provide the URL where the content is located, and those who want the movie would fetch it. Further, I really liked the Theater Key Retrieval protocol, which could again be implemented in theater servers to automatically get the KDM.

Harold

[Frank Cox]

I suspect it's because if they used a standard protocol then everyone could do it and would shrink the market available to outfits like Cinesend and Cinepost, reducing their ability to collect a toll for doing this type of distribution. Using custom hardware and a special protocol of some kind creates a barrier to entry for competitors.

As far as I know, there's no particular reason why "anyone" couldn't just set up their own distribution system using something like ftp. I was instructed to download a movie from the production company's dropbox account a few months ago, believe it or not.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Seems like a low cost distributor could provide the fetch software for free to theaters and then use something like Amazon Web Services to distribute the content. Content producers would pay whomever can deliver the content for the least amount of money. It just seems a waste to have another piece of hardware in every theater for another movie distribution system. It's like having to subscribe to a dozen home streaming services to get a wide variety of content instead of just making content available using a URL. The Internet is supposed to be distributed content hosting.

Harold

[Leo Enticknap]

When IP TV in the consumer market first started up, every rival system involved a separate set-top box: Broku, Amazon Slime, you name it. Your TV would have needed to have 25 HDMI jacks to use all of them! Now we have smart TVs with all these competing services as apps within them. Presumably when the DCP over IP market has shaken down, the competing services will provide an app to go on your TMS system, and you'll no longer need a 10ft tall 19" rack in your booth, just to hold all the server/receivers.

[Carsten Kurz]

@Harold: The two remaining major IP-based distribution services in germany use very different approaches. Gofilex prefers to have a dedicated line (cable in most cases) that they supply/mandate on their own (and pay for). Yet their service is absolutely free for cinemas (except for electric supply cost, obviously). They employ a large cable internet provider that is available all over germany (which doesn't mean every location can get their service, but their general coverage is nation wide). If their preferred cable provider is not available at the site, they use existing internet connections. As far as I know, their minimum requirement for using existing connections is 50MBit/s downstream. If they use the customers/cinemas own internet connection, they actually pay the cinema for using it (per DCP/transfer). The cable lines they manage themselves usually offer at least 200MBit/s.

They will always supply their own VPN router and rack mount NAS storage device. The NAS is more or less opaque for the user - there is a generic FTP login for the cinema server/TMS in order to access content. It is a common NAS, but cinemas are given read-only access. I don't know which protocol they use for distribution, but I assume it is plain FTP or SFTP or FTPS.
At least for a while, they even supplied an IP-supply switchbox, so that they were able to powercycle their equipment without cinema staff being present if needed (modem/router/NAS). I don't know if they still do it, we still have one in operation on our site. So, their upfront cost for line supply and equipment cost to start distribution was comparably high. Their benefit was, they can claim (also towards the studios) to have everything under their control (incl. line/protocol/equipment security). I don't know if any studio or distributor reps had actually been concerned about security issues transferring their precious content over the malicious internet given the security realities of DCI DCP encryption. It is possible that on some management levels, there had been some uneducated decision-making going on. But, bear in mind, some studios/distributors here still transmit unencrypted features, so, SOME considerations concerning content privacy are not completely laughable. Whatever, I think most of these reservations now seem to be a thing of the past.
Never had a single transfer issue with Gofilex. They still create 'some' minor additional effort as their cable modem/IP provider mandates the occcasional modem reset or modem exchange on site. Their NAS uses a 4drive RAID, and while on our device none of them failed in 5 years, I know that colleagues received replacement drives without prior notice after the Gofilex NOC noticed something was wrong.


The second major DCP provider here, CinePost, always expects a standard, customer mandated generic broadband access on site and uses whatever is available. They are not too picky about connection speed, I think they even start as low as 16MBit/s. That is probably because they also supply trailers through a luxury web based portal, and it's free for the clients to only access trailers, and 16MBit/s is enough for trailers, especially when their solid transfer client is used.
CinePost supplies a lean autostart software client for all common platforms, WIN7-WIN10, Mac OS, Linux. They also supply a client as a software plugin for intel-based NAS systems from Synology so you can have your own dedicated hardware device with their software, that you can still manage on your own. CinePost uses Aspera FASP. Needless to say their client has no issues with connection interruptions, machine reboots, etc., it always picks up where it was interrupted. After the transfer, an additional automatic hash check is performed. Currently, CinePost pays the cinema for using their general broadband connection, around 4.50US$ per feature transfer. That is probably not so much considered a compensation as such, but an incentive, as the competitor Gofilex pays for everything.
Except for some single case at the very beginning, we never had data/DCP integrity issues with them (in that single case the content had been received through their beta-version-client on a remote site and then had been transferred to our cinema through a USB disk, so we were not 100% sure where the corruption happened).


BTW - both these providers existed as disk based DCP distributors before and still maintain this capability even today. If a successful connection/transfer to their equipment or client can not be made early enough before the DCPs booked schedule, they will ship a disk automatically. Occasionally, we run out of disk space on the machine that runs the download client. Then we receive an email immediately to check and secure sufficient disk space for the pending transfer.

Both Gofilex and Cinepost also offer KDM distribution, however, at least for germany, Gofilex is rarely used by the distributors/studios, while Cinepost had a solid foot in that area well before they started electronic transfers.


Occassionally, we screen Bollywood movies who have their own specific distribution schemes and agents here. In most of these occasions, I actually downloaded (large!) encrypted DCPs as browser downloads from their Google drives. That is, every single file/asset of the DCP individually. In reels, easily counting 50 files or more per feature.
I couldn't find a smarter way to do it, since we don't use a (paid) Google drive of sufficient capacity for direct sharing, and, as the Google drive webinterface doesn't use standard HTML methods, common browser download managers do not seem to work. There may be some specialised GMAIL browser plugins to solve that issue, but, so far it doesn't happen often enough for me to bother. I once tried the 'download all' (folder) function of the GoogleDrive web frontend, but that seems to incur a server-side ZIP compression of a +200GByte DCP which never came to an end. Also, it would be no fun to repeat or resume downloading that type of file in case of a connection reset...




- Carsten

[Leo Enticknap]

At least for a while, they even supplied an IP-supply switchbox, so that they were able to powercycle their equipment without cinema staff being present if needed (modem/router/NAS).

Shameless plug alert: our IS-20D is perfect for that, offering six channels of mains AC plus two 12v relay supplies that can be switched either in a pre-programmed sequence (including the timing and sequence order), or individually, via IP commands or a web UI. Its primary purpose is energy efficiency - to enable the automated shutdown (e.g. via a cue at the end of a playlist) of stuff that doesn't need to be powered up during the night, for example. But it also enables a tech to power cycle a circuit remotely, to troubleshoot equipment that is unresponsive and therefore can't be soft rebooted. We also have a Q-Sys plugin for it.