[mythtv-users] FCC admits CableCARD a failure, vows to try something else

[Brian Wood]

On Saturday 05 December 2009 10:33:54 am Bill Bogstad wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Simon Hobson 
<linux at thehobsons.co.uk> wrote:
> > Francesco Peeters wrote:
> >>  > The movie industry has more at stake, though, in a way.  It's not
> >> just
> >>
> >>>  piracy they're trying to avoid -- it's cross-border sales, the same
> >>>  thing DVD region encoding was trying to prevent.  Movies routinely 
go
> >>>  on sale in the U.S. while they're still in theaters in Europe, and
> >>>  vice versa.  They're afraid of cannibalizing their own sales if people
> >>
> >>  > can freely play back stuff sold in other countries.
> >>
> >>
> >> Well, they *could* try releasing the movie at the same time in the
> >> European theaters as well...  ;-)
> >
> > And that brings us back to money again - why do you think there is so
> > much pressure for cinemas to go digital ? Cinemas get the costs (a
> > digital projector for that size of screen doesn't come cheap), and the
> > film distributors get the savings - if cinemas go digital, then the
> > distributors can print less copies and also save on the physical shipping
> > costs.
> >
> > The main reason they stagger cinema releases is that it allows them
> > significant savings on film costs. Every cinema that shows a film in
> > traditional "big roll of pictures on a strip" form has to have a print of
> > the film - and it can't be shared with any other cinema wanting to show
> > the film at the same time. By releasing in the US, and then in Europe a
> > few months later, it allows them to ship the prints around the US, and
> > then ship the same prints over to Europe - instead of printing twice as
> > many copies.
> 
> I admit that I've never watched a movie in a theater anywhere other
> then the US, but I would have thought that
> they would at least add subtitles if not dubbing the movie before
> releasing it in most European countries.  Do they really
> show English only films in most of Europe?

Certainly in the UK that's the case :-)

A large proportion of Europeans understand English, it's mostly the 
Americans who think mono-lingualism is OK.

It would be nice if they did captions the way they are done at the 
Metropolitan Opera in NYC, where the customer gets to decide whether 
captions are displayed or not. I understand they are working on multiple 
languages for the captions (if they haven't done it already, I don't get to 
the Met very often lately).