Hollywood Is Fighting Billionaire Sean Parker's Plan To Let You Rent Movies Still in Theaters For $50 (businessinsider.com)

Billionaire Sean Parker's plans to bring movies to your home as soon as they release in theaters has hit new roadblocks.

After receiving praises for "Screening Room" from directors and producers Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, J.J. Abrams, and Peter Jackson, as well as Hollywood studios, the buzz for the startup has started to wane.

 From a report: Though Parker and cofounder Prem Akkaraju have promoted the company in the last two years at CinemaCon, it's gotten little traction due to a naivete of the industry, competitors, and studios' and theater chains' decade-long discussion about how to move forward on Premium VOD (PVOD) (alternative source), Business Insider has learned.

 "Everything you've heard in the press about studios and theaters wanting to explore a PVOD window, nothing about that revolves around Screening Room," a source close to the talks told Business Insider. 

Screening Room's main pitch to studios and exhibitors has been that it can bring added revenue to all sides of the equation. Out of the proposed $50 rental fee, 20% would go to the movie's distributor, and a participating theater chain would get up to $20 of the fee, plus each customer receives two tickets to see that rented title at their local theater. Screening Room would take 10% of each fee.

 Sources told Business Insider that all of the bells and whistles Screening Room is selling don't matter until the studios and theaters can agree on a Premium VOD (or PVOD) window. Industry players don't want movies to be available on PVOD simultaneously with theatrical release dates because the first two weeks of a theatrical run are still when studios and exhibitors get a majority of a movie's income.

Sean Parker Is Going To Great Lengths To Ensure 'Screening Room' Is Piracy Free, Patents Reveal (torrentfreak.com) 

 Napster co-founder Sean Parker has been working on his new service called Screening Room, which when becomes reality, could allow people to watch the latest Hollywood blockbusters in their living room as soon as they premiere at the box office. This week we get a glimpse at the kind of technologies Parker is using to ensure that the movies don't get distributed easily. 

Here are just two publicly accessed roadblocks to this endeavor out of dozens that are easily found on the net:

 https://www.tvaddons.ag/freetelly-windows-kodi/

https://popcorntime-online.tv/

There is all-so the bittorrent sites.

So why even try to charge $50.00 a current screening movie when people obviously are using other means to access them. 

 One has to recall how TOWER RECORDS was the most successful record store on earth at one point. It went to their heads and they never imagined that they could fall off of their lofty pedestal.

 "I don't like the title 'The Father of MP3,'" says Karlheinz Brandenburg. But he kinda is.

Then along come the likes of Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker who fathered the P2P fiel sharing service Napster. 

All of a sudden people had free access to every kind of music file. For three glorious years users could check out each others music collections and aquire music for free from one another.

And then came along Best Buy who had lower price tags for music then Tower Records had. Tower was proud and refused to lower their prices. Sales dropped like a lead ballon and the banks called in their loans that fueled the expansion of Tower Records forcing the sale of their only profitable store in Japan. 

They went out of business.

Draw your own conclusions... 

From a report: 

Over the past several weeks, Screening Room Media, Inc. has submitted no less than eight patent applications related to its plans, all with some sort of anti-piracy angle. 

For example, a patent titled "Presenting Sonic Signals to Prevent Digital Content Misuse" describes a technology where acoustic signals are regularly sent to mobile devices, to confirm that the user is near the set-top box and is authorized to play the content.

Similarly, the "Monitoring Nearby Mobile Computing Devices to Prevent Digital Content Misuse" patent, describes a system that detects the number of mobile devices near the client-side device, to make sure that too many people aren't tuning in.

 The general technology outlined in the patents also includes forensic watermarking and a "P2P polluter." The watermarking technology can be used to detect when pirated content spreads outside of the protected network onto the public Internet. "At this point, the member's movie accessing system will be shut off and quarantined. 

If the abuse or illicit activity is confirmed, the member and the household will be banned from the content distribution network," the patent reads. [...] Screening Room's system also comes with a wide range of other anti-piracy scans built in. Among other things, it regularly scans the Wi-Fi network to see which devices are connected, and Bluetooth is used to check what other devices are near.