The British Academy of Film and Television will be supplying judges with secure DVD players from Cinea for this year’s award season. The move is intended to answer studio’s concerns that “screener disks” sent to judges for consideration sometimes end up being pirated and ending up on the internet. Cinea’s secure players have already been used for the Oscar awards, following the MPAA’s campaign to halt the distribution of screener disks.
The specially encrypted disks will only play in Cinea’s S-VIEW sv300 DVD players, though the players themselves can play ordinary DVDs too. Disks are sent to the authorised viewer and are initialised and marked with the player identity when inserted into the sv300. By initialising the disks in this way, studios will know which player the disk came from if it ever goes astray.
“We are very pleased to be working with Cinea to give our members the opportunity to receive secure screeners. The British Academy takes the threat of piracy very seriously, and we welcome any solution that can reduce the risk of unauthorized copying.” said David Parfitt, Chair of BAFTA’s Film Committee.
Variety is reporting that it will cost studios US$25,000 (€20,650) per film, plus a license fee to Cinea, to secure the screener disks with the S-VIEW system. Cinea will pay for the players and encoding themselves, and is in discussion with studios for further uses of the S-VIEW technology to secure the post-production process for film makers. It can be used for the secure distribution of dailies and other works in progress, ensuring that digital copies don’t end up being leaked onto the internet. Something that was almost impossible with 35 or 70mm film.
Each sv300 player is individually addressable, allowing distributors to decide exactly who views their content, from large groups of thousands to a single individual.
