Tired of waiting in long lines at the theater on Friday nights, only to get to the auditorium and find that the only seats left are in the front corner, where you not only will strain your neck, but your eyeballs will go all wonky from the crazy side angle you're trying to watch the movie at? Well worry no more as the MPAA is making every effort to inject new films straight to your cable box at an undisclosed price.
Variety reports that the MPAA is lobbying for approval on some sort of mystery tech that would allow them to shoot films directly to your TV, including films that are still in theaters. The technical advancement here versus it just being a new Pay-Per-View service is in the realm of anti-piracy which they claim will stop pirates from getting a hold of movies that are streamed to homes.
Not that I would condone doing this, but the VAST majority of pirated first run movies appear online as “cams” or versions of the film captured by pointing a camcorder at the screen. Not only would streaming new films into people's homes make this process WAY easier, it would give pirates the advantage of being able to record direct audio increasing the quality of the final product. Second of all, you can rest assured that any good pirate knows how to record direct to their computer from their TV signal. It will only be a matter of time before someone figures out how to get around the anti-piracy tech the MPAA is proposing and put really high quality versions of brand new films online for the piracy community to download.
There is opposition in Washington though, due to the fact that the proposal comes with few specifics and is generally just a bad idea. There's no price point or defined period of time for the delivery of films to the home. Of course all of those details will be worked out sooner or later, but something tells me the opposition will find more reasons to be on the other side.
There's a million reasons why this is a bad idea, and their singular justification of, “"Many of us love movies, but we just can't make it to the theater as often as we'd like,” is not enough to offset the uproarious theater owners and endless piracy issues, of which there will be many, I guarantee it. Going to the theater is as much about the experience as it is about the film, and hopefully if this all gets passed, people will remember that.
