Deluxe "eCinema" delivery service is coming in December

[Jon Dent]

I had to break out the old portable CRU dock for Bullet Train. I'd really like to know who the asshat is at Sony that stubbornly refuses to get with the times by continuously providing only 5.1 tracks for non Atmos installations and refusing to allow content to be distributed online by Deluxe.

Every other fucking studio gives you 7.1 and a digital upload.

[Frank Cox]

I've occasionally (rarely) received movies that I didn't have booked. Not too often and not recently, though.

[James Gardiner]

Twice now, I've received a Trail Mix hard drive even though trailers are coming in over the QNAP system.

And, this week I was surprised to get a notice that we've received a Downton Abbey download, which was a surprise to me because we've never booked that movie.

So, I'm curious if anyone else has seen this kind of thing.

About the Keys-in-email thing, I don't understand why they can't just send'em out in the eCinema system like they do the movies. They could still do email too, which would cover the redundancy they need.

If they really want to do something useful they could make it possible for the key to self-ingest. I suppose the server would need to go looking for it.

I get Hard drives STILL. Been asking for eCinema delivery for 4 years. For some reason, they don't want to give it to certain types of cinemas in my region.
Anyway, I get DCP delivery, physical, about 1-2 times per year for films I never Booked. It's not new. My guess it's a slip of the mouse button click. I just roll my eyes and think, there goes $100 for services rendered, not needed. And move on.

In terms of KDMs. Yes, Email should always happen as a backup. But in regards to the delivery entity delivering the KDM. I don't think it's commercially viable for a few reasons. The delivery entity would then become connected to this workflow (And have to take on responsibilities they don't want to.) If for some reason it does not work, they get calls they don't want. (Cost money to cater to those calls.) and they don;t/cannot make any more money from doing so. Commercially I don't see this happening as there is no commercial gain.
two, why implement a function that is supposed to be already in your TMS and the TMS maker takes responsibility for its function.

If they did take care of KDMs, they would need to implement a method for distributors to push delivery of KDMs into the system for delivery. Not everyone is going to use the delivery agent for KDM creation.

Emails are easy and federated. TMS's have implemented functions to ingest this as part of the solutions. My free cinema-catcher-app as a full automated KDM delivery system if you want. (However, it only supports dolby and Qube right now but I will update it soon)

The only perceived advantage, for the cinema owners, is a single person/entity to call if things go wrong, but from my perspective that has issues as you don't want a single gatekeeper entity to be established in the industry. It has been shown to result in undesirable side effects.

[Darin Steffl]

We had Lightyear sent via HDD and eCinema so I notified them about it. I also received 2 USB drives for The Black Phone trailer. Very weird.

We've stopped receiving trailmix drives thankfully and get weekly downloads now.

They said keys will come in the future.

[Mike Blakesley]

Twice now, I've received a Trail Mix hard drive even though trailers are coming in over the QNAP system.

And, this week I was surprised to get a notice that we've received a Downton Abbey download, which was a surprise to me because we've never booked that movie.

So, I'm curious if anyone else has seen this kind of thing.

About the Keys-in-email thing, I don't understand why they can't just send'em out in the eCinema system like they do the movies. They could still do email too, which would cover the redundancy they need.

If they really want to do something useful they could make it possible for the key to self-ingest. I suppose the server would need to go looking for it.

[James Gardiner]

All cinemas are operating on email based KDM transmission, many TMS as well. It has too many benefits over other data transmission protocols, I don't think they will give it up shortly. The 'pending' indicator on the portal is indeed a nuisance. I inquired a couple of times why certain KDMs turn up there but when you download, you get empty ZIP files. Because the KDMs, while being shown there already for download, have not yet been created.
It's useless, it's just their way of doing things.

Though, I can't remember a single time having issues with KDM email transmission. However, from day one, we configured two dedicated receiving addresses exclusively for KDMs, and both at different mail providers.

100% agree.
Email is prefered as its a rock solid system and also supports redundancy. I cannot see them ever going away from Emails.
I implemented an Automatic Email solution many years ago and it has been brilliant. Never fails.. And the nice part is.. I have 2 Email accounts with different providers as a backup. One of them automatically redirects emails into my AutoKDM server which picks them up in real time. From the time they are sent to when they are ingested is under 1 minute. Was very useful years ago as distributors use to stuff up KDMs quote often. Not so much now. But now i have a backend system that auto send them reports of when KDMs are required, so that has helped a lot too. No last minute KDM requests.

There was always a suggestion that the distributors wanted a indication of when KDMs where received and ingested. So a more integrated solution has always been considered. But really, I don't see why moving away from Emails would be needed, just a reporting solution run by the cinema that reported back to the studio is all that is needed. But as its so reliable now anyway, I don't really see it happening. Its not needed and would cost a lot to implement and run.

[Carsten Kurz]

All cinemas are operating on email based KDM transmission, many TMS as well. It has too many benefits over other data transmission protocols, I don't think they will give it up shortly. The 'pending' indicator on the portal is indeed a nuisance. I inquired a couple of times why certain KDMs turn up there but when you download, you get empty ZIP files. Because the KDMs, while being shown there already for download, have not yet been created.
It's useless, it's just their way of doing things.

Though, I can't remember a single time having issues with KDM email transmission. However, from day one, we configured two dedicated receiving addresses exclusively for KDMs, and both at different mail providers.

[Mike Blakesley]

I'm surprised the Keys aren't coming over the broadband yet. Maybe they're working on a way for them to auto-ingest and that's what's taking longer?

I usually get our keys off of the Deluxe portal -- but three times now, when I go to the portal to download them, they're still "pending" on the portal, and they stay that way. So I have to go to the email, which takes longer. It's good to have the backup, but I don't understand why the simplest bit of data is taking the longest (and is the least reliable).

[Carsten Kurz]

I think you just have to wait for some market concentration to settle in. We have Gofilex since 2015. They paid for a very fast cable connection into our building. We had a poor ADSL connection before and no chance to upgrade to something faster at the time. The result of Gofilex supplying us with a faster line was a clear benefit to us, as now there are options to use that cable connection throughout the building.

So, all depends. The remaining two download services we use (aside from the occasional google drive or filemail download) are running on a standard office PC. Doesn't bother us much. We still get the occasional hard drive, however, other than in earlier times, they don't bug us as early as previously to send them back. So we can collect 4 or 5 drives before we send them back. Overall, we're satisfied that Gofilex, our main DCP source, maintains a dedicated box at our site. But in our case, it is only one. We never had Gofilex offering us a backup download. However, I know that Deluxe UK had an aspera solution set up, I also at some time downloaded their client to check into it, but we never needed it. Currently, Gofilex' backup is sending a hard disk. Which is usually good enough, since we typically are scheduled for content transfers very early. Typically, the transfer is initiated with the booking, and mostly, there would be ample time to analyse and solve a transfer issue or send a disk.

[James Gardiner]

Hi all,
Here in Australia, GoFilex is taking over for Deluxe/MPS sites joining forces. If you had both, one would be decommissioned, and if you were not running GoFilex software, they will transition you to it remotely so you don't really notice it.
It is strange, Australia is one of the last regions in the world to properly transition to digital delivery, but at the same time we have 4 (from 5 now due to this) trying to dominate a very small market.
Its super weird.

The big issue is in Australia, you can only get digital delivery if you allow Deluxe/MPS to put in a dedicated Internet link. They pay for it.. but you have to set up all this extra infrastructure. Many cinemas do not welcome this. More junk in the rack. They would prefer contribution to their own internet link, (To help pay for it or make it faster). Cinema also pay nothing at all for delivery unlike the rest of the world by the sounds of it. From following this thread.. Cinema/Distributor both contributing to the cost. est. combined total $70-$100 usd. Andone know exactly how much?

The only method to this madness from my perspective is along the lines of... "He who controls the spice, controls the universe." But in this case, controls the content cinemas can access.

In any case, I wanted to ask, recently I got an automated Email from Deluxe One to allow me to download a TLR using Aspera download tools. It looked like a fall back solution in case a site delivery box was down or link broken to allow a cinema to download a DCP via any other method they had as a backup. Anyway, this is what it looked like, but when I asked Deluxe about it, they denied it was anything like that, it was just a once of test.

Can other regions get back to me if this is what it appears to be. A backup download system for a link or box breakdown? That would be great. I expect they don't want to paint it this way in Australia as they don't want people not NOT get the dedicated link. Hell, I would be fine with an Aspera Email download link as the way to get a DCP. Still better than a physical drive. And if I don't have to install all that junk at my locations. I'll just go with that.

[Justin d'Entremont]

I've already asked these questions and keys will not be delivered this way "yet". Trailers and keys are coming later this year. For now, it's just new movies and nothing else.

I'll also be happy to get keys this way so we can be done using a flash drive to transfer from a computer.

If you're willing to have a computer setup that has access to both the internet and the projection network running an FTP server on it (preferably with a firewall between them...), Deluxe can set you up to receive keys via your own FTP server.

[Justin d'Entremont]

When I open the web gui of our server, it shows Gofilex which makes sense since Deluxe bought a majority share of them.

I noticed this as well, but I don't have a login to see what's inside. Also, in the "Deluxe One" portal, if you look around (I think it's in the tooltip that comes up if you hove over eDelivery) it shows the carrier as "Gofilex".

We have the same CInesend model as Frank does. Our first unit failed, and they had to send us another. They had me try to troubleshoot it before shipping it back for a replacement, and upon opening it up, it's a pretty barebones motherboard inside the chassis, with a Samsung SSD. SSD died. Seems it's just a standard Linux box with RAID. You can plug a VGA monitor into it and watch the boot sequence.

Pretty clearly, when Deluxe did their "partnership" with Cinesend, they just remoted in an installed the Gofilex software onto them.

[Justin d'Entremont]

Do you have SSH access to the box? Or do they provide for something like SNMP? That way you could easily monitor the available storage on the partitions.

What ways do they export the content? Is FTP the only way or do they also offer NFS or SMB sharing to access the files? You could monitor the "content' directory for changes and send yourself an e-mail once a certain new directory appears via some scripting.

Regarding space management, I guess they'll always match the content on there against your bookings and once a booking expires, I expect them to put it on a "purge list", that automatically removes it from the machine. It may not happen immediately, but via some kind of (cron) job on the machine that runs every so often. That's the way it usually happens around here.

SSH appears to be running, but requires an SSH cert to login (username and password auth is disabled).

Port for SNMP is open, but using a non-standard community name, so I can't add it to our monitoring system.

[Darin Steffl]

With drives, I also felt like we needed to ingest almost every trailer just in case we showed one of the movies. I didn't hold onto the drive very long.

Now with the QNAP having 16tb of storage and content being stored for quite some time and our GDC only having 2tb, I'll only ingest the trailers we actually need to keep our GDC much cleaner and less cluttered with trailers. And I assume we'll now get weekly updates for trailers instead of us only getting one trailmix drive every 4 weeks prior to this.

[Jon Dent]

They seem to just do some kind of a diff on the trailer directory, probably using something like rsync, so the weekly file transfer for trailers doesn't really amount to that much.

The trailers just get updated each week by magic, and I don't even notice anything happening until they send me an email saying "here's the new stuff".

That would make the most sense. I'm actually excited that they've started doing the trailers now too. That was always the biggest pain in the ass for me with hard drives constantly showing up

EDIT: Its also nice because the titles appear alphabetically on the ingest page in our IMS3000. Hard drives were always displayed in a random, jumbled order so browsing through it was a real chore.