After seeing Storjlabs has targeted universities as potential customers, here is a suggestion for an industry that would be a hell of a customer. Will Storjlabs act on it? My doubts remain. But here is the suggestion:
Ever wondered how cinemas receive the movies for their projectors? Unbelievable but true: Commonly they receive a movie as digital file on an external hard drive. Shipped physically via courier services. According to sources, in Germany alone thousands over thousands of these hard drives are shipped from and to cinemas every week.
Digitalization in the movie industry and theaters has led to an increase of transportation needs as more movies get recorded and cinemas change their programs more frequently. These transports cost money and are not environment friendly.
Now you know what I am going to suggest: Wouldn’t it be the perfect use case if production companies would upload their movies to Tardigrade cloud services once and movie theatres all over the world could download them as needed?
It seems that this kind of transformation to cloud based delivery is already under way: Gofilex seems to be one company that offers digital delivery of movies.
It would be an amazing opportunity for Tardigrade to target this industry. It could serve as secure, fast, efficient, cheap, resilient and environment friendly storage and distribution cloud for the movie industry.
I don’t consider the Tardigrade network as ‘public’, they would be using it privately so that’s fine I think.
Performances would need to be high for this to be interesting, and I read contradictory things about Tardigrade’s performances and stability for huge file uploads so far…
some people won’t understand the technology nor how to use it…
and those are often the best at complaining… from the tests i’ve seen it looks to be good… really good… unrealistically good, but thats ofc because i can only compare it to none distributed cloud technologies and all those are inferior in some aspects, such as bandwidth.
ofc there are disadvantages to distributed cloud also… but thats how it always is… invent a plane and you also invented the plane crash…
when i have to regard something, if people disagree / conflict then it’s not obvious, might still be a great product, but if people don’t understand it, then they will still dislike it.
if people all agree that it’s a good product then it most likely isn’t any more… it was and is now on the hype train, of a billion flies can’t be wrong… eat…
you want the 2nd, 3rd gen, tech / ideas… those that 70 or so % of people say is good, or 70% of those that know what they are talking about says are good…
and well if nobody likes it, then it’s either the hype train running in reverse, but most often it ended up being just plain bad.
long story short… people will never agree on anything aside from when it’s wrong… basically, people being divided isn’t a bad thing.
What I have read is that the files are even encrypted and play only on the specific projector identified by its serial number. I don’t know how they do that.
But anyway that is something that Storjlabs would have to do: To investigate the use case and what specific requirements this industry has and build that into Tardigrade.
one thing that would work really well is that the high 4x upload bandwidth demand for tardigrade would only be required in the upload location and all the cinema locations would still get basically full bandwidth internet download.
so in this specific case that can barely even be regarded as a downside… which is cool
ofc their encryption scheme might work by trans / encoding the film for each projector which might mean that each data stream / sequence would be required to be sent for each cinema location / projector… but even if that is the case… i doubt it gets anywhere near the costs of the logistics of mailing / transporting hdd’s around.
but really it would totally depend on how much effort has been put into that copyright protection method…
they might even have it so the data is useless for any other computer, and the projector might made tamper proof, so there is literally no way to read or access the data outside of scheduled projections and then after that it just stops working or deletes the data…
wouldn’t be to difficult to imagine a setup like that, with first of a human level security and then the offline part also being another security feature and then just as icing on the cake, inaccessible to anyone… thus either part can fail and even if it’s an intentional failure / attempted steal, then one needs to break two of them, and then the offline part could just be for kicks…
hiding away some sort of hardware that if exposed to the internet, like say if the encrypted hdd is a usb type device, then whenever plugged into an online system it would broadcast a silent alarm with which system have been breached… then maybe put a cellphone setup inside it also… just for good measure so it can cry about it even if it isn’t exactly online but just being compromised…
but maybe that’s more NSA level stuff rather than cinema
It seems that the infrastructure is well known, so each projector has a registered public key that is used to encrypt the KDM file which decrypts the DCP file. Which means there is only 1 encrypted movie file which is the same for every projector.
According to this paper a typical DCP file is about 200-250 GB, which I believe is a good size for Tardigrade.
Here is an example of a well known company within the motion picture media industry: https://dc.arri.de/en
From their services for theaters it is very interesting to see that they offer already download of trailers. But not whole movies. I am pretty sure they have never heard of Tardigrade but maybe they would be interested to learn about it.
certainly worth exploring and even if all of them aren’t crazy about it… if it will save them money, i’m sure it will get attention and a limited trial run… ofc with a long term utilization, it might be wise to ensure that they understand the advantage of a distributed cloud solution, so they don’t create a solution that isn’t optimized for the technology.
but if tardigrade can get a foot in the door, i’m sure it might very well replace their entire setup in a few years and these kinds of businesses don’t like to change stuff unless if they have to or have a financial incentive to do so.
so it may be a very long term steady stream of data transmissions.
Your showing a 8 years old clip. The industry (that Im working in) has evolved. You can now download movies directly to the cinema. A movie can be several terabytes in size. These movies have broadcast grade codecs and are not your regular H.264 or whatever you have.
StorJ would be way too slow for this. StorJ would not be able to sign a contract with a large Hollywood company as the fines IF for some crazy reason a leak would exists.
However for other CDN type of cases storj is already used.
Are you saying movie theaters download several TB movies to play? Some reason I highly doubt that maybe 100gig+ movies but not several TB movies. That seems far fetched.
This is not my industry, so I can only judge from the information that is available on the internet.
But according to the sources I have read, DCP delivery via courier is still common. The Youtube clip might be dated, but here is a case study from Japan for DCP delivery via cloud services and internet: https://www.signiant.com/resources/case-studies/broadmedia-terrestrial-digital-cinema-distribution-using-signiant-technology/
They mention satellite and courier delivery as inferior but common alternatives. But they explicitly mention 100 Mbps networks for the last mile so it does not seem to be reasonable that terabytes of data have to be downloaded for one single movie.
But surely this will evolve or has evolved that’s why I have said it would be up to Storjlabs to investigate if Tardigrade could be a concept for this industry.
I guess you never heard of MFX? A simple SD movie can be 100GB in size.
You need to understand these things: 1 bitrate 2 codec 3 resolution 4 refresh-rate
HD can be in 50-200 Mbit/s - For 4k that would be 200 to 800 Mbit/s. That’s 100 Megabytes per sec. Around 6 Gigabyte/min. Do the math yourself
Yeah the quality for cinema is a lot higher than your DVD. And 3D movies need even more…
But in the end, I think it doesn’t matter if a movie has 300GB or 3TB. They are not going to stream the movie live but download it once before they are showing it. At least that’s what I’d expect. Just imagine having a loading circle while watching a movie in the cinema
I understand it I also am familiar with Red cinema cameras and in its raw form can be several 100gig files for 8k footage, But still not several Terabytes. I guess for Imax cinemas require more quality, Are these files the raw footage or is it considered just uncompressed all together? I just haven’t seen it for myself, I know the imax movies can be around 650gigs.
