UFO Moviez' Satellite Film Distribution Model Combats Piracy

The Indian film industry produces over 500 films annually, which makes it one of the biggest film industries in the world. According to a recent study, the Indian movie industry is worth $1.8 bn. With 97 percent of the youth preferring to watch movies in theatres, the biggest challenge for the industry is film distribution across the geography of the nation. The film print delivery after a movie release was been conventionally done through various means of transport but the technique that is currently followed for movie distribution (explained below) will definitely leave you with some food for thought on how communication channels have revolutionised the way films are delivered.

Mumbai-based UFO Moviez, a digital cinema venture, distributes movies via the satellite medium resulting in enhancement of delivery rates of newly released movies to remote locations of the country. The company provides its own hardware infrastructure to theatre owners for receiving and running the movies with a home-grown encryption technology. The company has independently developed a licensing mechanism to deliver movies to scores of theatre owners. The film distributor receives the original negative print from the producer and copies the same into a number of positive prints based on the rights from the producer. Subsequently, the positive prints are distributed to theatre owners in the respective film territory.

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However, film distribution is easier said than done. Traditionally, the positive prints were physically delivered through various means of transport. India has about 14,000 cinema halls around the country. The delivery of these many prints is an expensive proposition. Moreover, the release of movies in B and C class cities is often delayed as distributors prefer A class cities for gaining more business. One of the fallouts of this model has been an increasing amount of piracy that eats away crores of rupees from the film industry’s rightful revenue.

Digitisation process of the movie at UFO

“The input from the producer for digitisation in the UFO system can either be in negative or positive print or DPX file format. The process takes approximately from 22 to 60 hours depending on the type of input format,” says Chavan. Post digitisation, the content is returned back to the content owner. Subsequently, the digital file is simultaneously distributed to all corners of the country having satellite coverage. The movie is downloaded in the server of the respective theatre.

Biztech2.0 gives you a low-down here of what happens behind the scenes at UFO Moviez from the moment content is delivered in the print format till the screening of the movie in various theatres. The film print goes through four stages before finally being screened at the theatre. The telecine stage deals with converting the print into a high definition standard on a D5 magnetic media tape. The digitisation stage comprises the film getting compressed into MPEG 4 format. In the third stage, the film gets encrypted frame by frame on a cine processor and is stored on an NFS (Network File System) server. From the NFS server, the print is remotely delivered to the Cinecaster at the satellite hub station located in Gurgaon, which is the fourth stage. The movie is transferred from the NFS server to the Cinecaster on a high-speed link. Theatres can then download the movie over a secure VSAT link.

“To ensure that the movies are not copied or duplicated after the download process, UFO Moviez provides its own infrastructure to the cinema halls,” says Chavan.

The theatre owner is not allowed to buy any off-the-shelf hardware from the market. UFO provides them with the necessary hardware that includes a satellite dish of 0.9 meters, a server and a digital projector attached to the server. Every time a digital file is downloaded, it gets stored on the server. Once the owner completes the licence formalities, the movie is available to be screened.

Encryption prevents content leakage

The encryption stage, which is the third stage in the digitisation process, involves frame-by-frame encryption. “The algorithm is system driven and not manual, thus making it difficult to identify the type of algorithm used for a particular movie,” says Chavan. At the transmission level, we have put in another layer of encryption over and above the encryption already inhabiting the satellite. After the movie is downloaded on the server of a particular theatre, it can only be decrypted using the keys provided by UFO Moviez. Moreover, the projector and the server are tightly coupled with each other using a unique algorithm. The final decryption only happens at the projector level. So, if the projector is not the same as provided by UFO, the movie will not play; this mechanism safeguards the company against piracy attempts.

Challenges and benefits

Major challenges arise from electricity shortage and irregular power supply which is non-regulated in nature. This affects few of the server components like hard disk. An online UPS is provided to the theatre to regulate the power supply and inspite of this if the hard disk is failed the redundancy in the form of additional hard disk is provided by the RAID Configuration using a RAID controller card.

Theatre owners have to gain confidence in running the UFO system. So the company regularly offers training programmes like primary level of trouble shooting, how to run advertisements etc.

“Piracy gets reduced to a considerable extent with digital distribution as the movie is available on the day of the release itself in all connected locations. This has also bolstered the revenues of theatre owners in B and C class cities, who have become a part of the UFO distribution network,” concludes Chavan.