English Entertainment
Hollywood taking lab route to fight piracy
MUMBAI: With the menace of film piracy showing no sign of letting up six Hollywood srudios – Disney, Paramount, Fox, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner will finance a multimillion-dollar research laboratory. The aim will be to find new ways to foil movie pirates.
It is to be called Motion Picture Laboratories, or MovieLabs, and is scheduled to begin operation this year. Media reports indicate that MovieLabs will have a budget of more than $30 million for its first two years. The idea arose from Hollywood’s contention that the consumer electronics and information technology industries are not investing heavily or quickly enough in piracy-fighting technology.
The venture will explore new technologies to detect illegal videotaping of films in theaters and evaluate new computer hardware and software that is being used by networks to distribute films.
MovieLabs will be looking at ways to jam camcorders, detect and block P2P transfers on campus and business networks.
It will build spyware for peer 2 peer networks and look at better ways to prevent home and personal digital networks from being tapped into by unauthourised users. The lab is modelled after CableLabs, which since 1988 has spearheaded pivotal innovations in the cable television industry – hastening the adoption of fiber optics, cable modems, telephony and digital video.
English Entertainment
Ellison takes his Paramount-Warner Bros case straight to theater owners
The Skydance chief goes to CinemaCon with promises and a skeptical crowd waiting
CALIFORNIA: David Ellison strode into a room packed with thousands of cinema owners and executives at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday and did something rather bold: he looked them in the eye and asked them to trust him.
The chief executive of Paramount Skydance vowed that his company would release a minimum of 30 films a year if regulators greenlight its proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, a deal that has made theater owners deeply, and loudly, nervous.
“I wanted to look every single one of you in the eye and give you my word,” Ellison told the crowd. “Once we combine with Warner Bros, we are going to make a minimum of 30 films annually across both studios.”
It was a confident pitch. Whether it landed is another matter. Cinema operators have already called on regulators to block the deal, and scepticism in the room was hardly concealed.
Ellison pushed back by pointing to recent form. Paramount, born from the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media last August, plans to release 15 films this year, nearly double the eight it put out in 2025. Progress, he argued, was already underway.
He also threw theater owners a bone they have long been chasing: all films, he pledged, would run exclusively in cinemas for a minimum of 45 days, drawing applause from a crowd that has spent years fighting for exactly that commitment across the industry.
“People can speculate all they want,” Ellison said, “but I am standing here today telling you personally that you can count on our complete commitment. And we’ll show you we mean it.”
Fine words. The regulators, however, will have the last one.
