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The Revolution Will Be Downloaded

By Manohla Dargis, Published: March 18, 2007

SOME film critics wax nostalgic about the big-screen experience in the age of the diminishing movie image, but I can’t relate. For me movies are movies whether on the big screen or small, on my laptop or on a plane, captured in celluloid or digital. My preferred medium is film, though like a lot of Americans, I imagine, my movie love was nurtured at home while flopped in front of a television, in my case while watching “Chiller Theater” and, every Sunday morning without fail, Abbott and Costello. The first commercially exhibited moving pictures were watched through peepholes in machines called Kinetoscopes, so watching a film on an iPod shouldn’t really seem all that different.

A Screen is a Screen is a Screen — isn’t it?

My interest in that question partly explains why I was eager to start downloading movies, which, like DVD and video rentals, seems to offer choices not only in what we watch but also in how. I enjoy the social aspect of going to the movies, but I also love watching films at home, for both the ease of use and the intimacy. When I was a teenager,
I watched movies on a tiny black-and-white television in my bedroom, wrapped in an adolescent cocoon.
Now I watch DVDs on a plasma television set in my living room and on the computer monitor in my office, sometimes with family, sometimes alone. On occasion I will watch a movie on my small laptop, so I can take the images with me as I fold the laundry or wash dishes. Certainly the idea of downloading sounds irresistible: you scroll through the delectable offerings — in the video store in my head, Abbott and Costello and Bela Tarr are both just clicks away — hit a few buttons, and voilà: cinema! The reality, as I recently discovered, is messier. No matter how souped up, a television set is just another household appliance; adding TiVo makes it a better appliance, but you still turn the box on and off. Downloading movies onto a computer, by contrast, is rather more complicated because computers are not yet appliances; they’re infernal machines.

When all the planets are aligned and your computer has enough memory and hasn’t been deluged with spam for lots of little multicolored pills, it will function just dandy. But try to download without enough disk space and through a wireless connection, as I initially did, and you may soon wonder why you’re spending so much time and energy to watch films you’ve never heard of on your computer rather than watching a “Children of Men” DVD on your dreamy big television. My first download stop was a new site called Jaman (jaman.com), still in the test stage, which promotes itself as “a global online community” that’s “pioneering social cinema.” I didn’t recognize most of the titles, though I see hundreds of films a year, and neither did a friend who programs a major American film festival. I did, however, come across Bryan Singer’s first feature, the creepy “Public Access,” which wasn’t dated, but which I saw when it had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993. Scrolling through the 55 titles from Asia, I scoped out that some of the women looked as if they were wearing bouffants, while a few of the men looked ready to hit the disco. Jaman doesn’t date its offerings, but a search on a movie information site soon solved two mysteries: “King Cat” was from 1967 and “Hong Kong Nocturne” from 1966. I ended up downloading two features and one short from the North American section (196 titles), only because I planned to watch the films on my laptop. It’s incredibly frustrating to watch subtitled films on a small screen, which is why I ponied up for a 32-inch flat-screen television several years ago.

I picked the first film to download, J. T. Petty’s “Soft for Digging,” because I liked the nicely composed photograph of two men walking in the woods and the short clip (one of the site’s best features is its preview snippets) of a guy who looked a little like Ed Koch stalking about in a blood-red bathrobe. The film had played at some festivals, which, while not a guarantee of quality, did suggest some kind of provenance. While no Luddite, I turned out to be woefully unprepared to join the download revolution. It took many frustrating hours to get Jaman’s proprietary player up and running and then to download my selected titles. I had better success elsewhere: I downloaded a smeary-looking copy of Marlon Brando’s “One-Eyed Jacks” from GreenCine (greencine.com), a boutique online site with terrific rental titles (it has Criterion titles I’ve never heard of) but rather less tantalizing video-on-demand offerings. I also tried to download a copy of “Team America: World Police” (because once is never enough) from iTunes. That site suggested that I didn’t have enough disk space to download the movie but encouraged me to proceed.

I did. As it happens, I did not have enough space, so I couldn’t complete the download. iTunes billed me $9.99 anyway.In the end it took several days and many more glitches, including a few crashes, as well as a last-ditch consultation with my on-site technical adviser (my husband) to diagnose the problems I was having with Jaman, which were eventually solved by buying a larger hard drive and forgoing my usual wireless connection. I lost track of how many hours it took to access “Soft for Digging” (Jaman said it would take “1 day, 2hr” to download), but I finally watched it, or at least the first half-hour or so. I just lost interest around the time a man (not the Ed Koch look-alike) appeared to strangle a little girl. One of the nice things about controlling your content is that you can hit the off switch whenever you want.

Porto Media at MIPCOM in Cannes

From 8 to 11 October 2007, Porto Media met with and entertained the major Hollywood studios at MIPCOM in Cannes.

Please click on the thumbnails to view details and larger photographs

US film executives among investors in Galway firm

By Eamon McGrane , The Irish Times , 2007

Accountant Ossie Kilkenny and three US film executives are backing technology developed in Galway that will allow people to download standard and high-definition films in seconds from ATM-style machines. Investors in the project include Special Olympics chairman and film producer Tim Shriver, who is a nephew of former US president John F Kennedy. The second US investor is former Fox Cable executive Lindsay Gardner. This deal is his first since stepping down from the Murdoch-owned business and joining LA-based boutique investment firm Mediatech Capital Partners.

The third US investor, former Warner Brothers president Jay Emmett, has been involved in the film business for more than 25 years. The company behind the technology, Portomedia, also has a number of technology partners, including IBM, Toshiba, Panasonic and Samsung. The Republic will be the testing ground for the technology, which was developed by founder and chief executive Chris Armstrong.

The Galway-based business has been developing the product for the past three years and has recently signed a series of deals with the six major film studios in Hollywood, in addition to a large number of independent studios.

The first "Moviepoint" machines are set to be rolled out in October and November in Galway *. The initial locations will be in airports, train stations, coffee shops and convenience outlets. Using a portable USB device, films can be downloaded from the Moviepoint machines in 15 to 30 seconds. The initial roll-out is aimed at the mobile user with a PC or laptop. Those who would prefer to watch films on a television will be able to buy a box called a Movievault, which can store and play the films. One of the main concerns raised by film studios about the venture was the provision of digital rights management (DRM) to protect the content and ensure it could not be copied illegally.

Portomedia marketing director Cathal Deavy said these worries were assuaged when the major US studios ratified Microsoft Windows DRM as a bona fide rights management solution in April 2006. "When that happened, it gave us the green light to go ahead and we knew we were protected . . . Windows DRM is on every laptop and PC, and once that happened we were in business," he said.

According to the International Video Federation, the Irish DVD rental market was worth €14 million in 2006. Portomedia plans to grow this business by 15 per cent in five years.

* The Movie Point closed trial is currently in progress in Galway and the service will be rolled out to the public in Q1 2008.

Movies from an ATM

By Eamon McGrane , The Irish Times , 2007

An Irish firm has developed a way for people to get films in much the same way they withdraw money from cash machines, Eamon McGrane reports. An Irish company has Hollywood in a technological spin. After years of fighting technology that has been used to pilfer movies from the internet or circumvent copy protection on discs or DVD machines, movie moguls look set to embrace a system that will not only secure the content from theft, but create new distribution channels for their products.

Like the music industry before them, the film studio giants have had an uneasy relationship with technology and are desperately looking to avoid the meltdown the music sector suffered over peer-to-peer file sharing. Illegal movie downloading is incredibly prolific and sites such as YouTube are being monitored constantly for prohibited uploading of films.

Portomedia, a Galway company, has come up with a way to distribute "rights protected" movies that can be downloaded from places you might not expect - an airport, a train station or university. Simply use a USB key, insert it into a kiosk called a Movieppoint, which is not dissimilar to an ATM, and in 15-30 seconds you can have a movie to play on your PC, laptop, mobile device and TV. For the film studios the beauty of the device is that when you download the movie the licence to play it comes with it. After a period of, for example, 48 hours the licence expires and the movie cannot be watched another time unless the user chooses to purchase or rent it again.

Portomedia is the brainchild of Chris Armstrong, a physicist by profession who one night tried unsuccessfully to rent a film. After withdrawing cash from an ATM he thought: "why couldn't I get a film this way?" And so an idea was born.

While dreaming up and building the technology was one thing, having content was another. Armstrong realised early on that if his idea and venture was to succeed he'd have to get the film studios on his side. So off he went to Hollywood. After IBM caught wind of his idea and saw the potential, the IT company facilitated introductions with some of the most powerful people in showbiz. "We were invited back by Disney and its president Bob Iger. He asked us to make a presentation to over 100 executives.

"So now we've gained their confidence and they know we're there to help them. We will increase the number of transactions of movie sales and rentals. And if successful, the Moviepoints will be as ubiquitous as ATM machines." Irish people wishing to avail of the USB key and Movievault box for TV viewing will be able to purchase them online in the coming months from www.moviepoint.net. If the Irish tests are successful Moviepoints will be distributed throughout Europe and in the US.

"A lot of people asked me why we haven't started in New York or Sacramento and why Ireland. I said why not. After all, we're based here and per capita have one of the highest movie consumption audiences in Europe and the world," said Armstrong.

While Portomedia has been warmly received in Hollywood, some analysts are still predicting that online movie downloads will be the way of the future. With more fibre networks on the way, the downloads will become even quicker. "Yes, that's true," said Armstrong. "But the net will get clogged up especially if they're trying to download high definition films. We have the advantage of portability and mobility - being able to move content from the Movievault at home, or on a laptop and bring it with you.

"I think when we have no bottlenecks for downloading and you can choose what kind of media you want, then we'll really start to see the digital world we've all been talking about and my wish is that Portomedia will help to place Ireland at the centre of it. I hope it will capture people's imaginations.