M+E Daily

By Paul Sweeting

Hollywood producers and directors have traditionally been protective of the theater-going experience, regarding the big screen as the native and natural venue for seeing their movies. But attitudes may be shifting.

According to Variety, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, J.J. Abrams, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard have all lined up to support Sean Parker’s startup The Screening Room, which wants to deliver movies to the home day-and-date with their theatrical release using a special piracy-hardened set-top box. According to the website Collider, the filmmakers have all received shares in the company but not all have invested funds directly in the venture.

Martin Scorcese, Taylor Hackford and Frank Marshall are also on board, according to Deadline Hollywood.

In-home day-and-date release is not a new idea. But it has never gained much traction in Hollywood due to fears of undercutting the theatrical box office and of piracy. DirecTV’s premium early-VOD offering, Home Premiere, allowed subscribers to rent films for $30, 60 days after they appeared in theaters, failed quickly. Magnolia Pictures has long pushed the day-and-date theatrical-plus-digital release model, while Lionsgate (Margin Call), Warner Bros. (Veronica Mars) and Sony Pictures (The Interview) have all dabbled with the model.

Netflix has promoted day-and-date release for its original feature films, starting with Beasts of No Nation, but theaters have by and large shunned those efforts.

With it’s high-octane backing, however, Screening Room may have a better shot at success than earlier efforts.

“I had concerns about ‘DirecTV’ in 2011, because it was a concept that I believe would have led to the cannibalization of theatrical revenues, to the ultimate detriment of the movie business,” Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson said in a statement. “Screening Room, however, is very carefully designed to capture an audience that does not currently go to the cinema. That is a critical point of difference with the DirecTV approach – and along with Screening Room’s robust anti-piracy strategy, is exactly why Screening Room has my support. Screening Room will expand the audience for a movie – not shift it from cinema to living room.”

The Screening Room plans to charge consumers $150 for a specially designed set-top box, and then charge $50 to stream a movie day-and-date with its theatrical release. Consumers will have 48 hours in which to watch it. Unlike previous early-release VOD efforts, The Screen Room plans to cut theater owners in on in-home take, sharing perhaps as much as $20 of the $50 ticket, according to reports. Home viewers will also be offered two free tickets to see the movie in a theater, where it is hoped they will also spend money at the concession counter.

That arrangement has attracted the support of at least one major theater chain, AMC, but others remain unassuaged.

“I think this is not a good idea, and I sincerely doubt the studios will go for it at that price point. It feels like a half-baked plan to me,” Alamo Drafthouse Cinema CEO Tim League told the Hollywood Reporter.

Cinemark CEO Mark Zoradi also issued a statement expressing concerns.

“The exhibition window has been the most stable window long-term and the theatrical success of a film drives the value proposition for the studios’ downstream ancillary markets,” Zoradi  said. “Cinemark believes that any day-and-date propositions must be critically evaluated to avoid the devaluation of the exhibition window and all subsequent revenue streams of our content providers.”

Technologically, The Screening Room resembles Xcinex, a Rockville, Md.-based startup that began shopping around a ticketed home-viewing system in Hollywood last year.

The Xcinex platform allows content owners to give consumers the option to stream movies, live performances and sporting events directly into the home, using a pay-per-viewer system. Consumers would buy a small hardware device that detects the number of viewers in the room, and essentially charges for each set of eyeballs for the content. Content owners would directly upload content to the company’s platform, and would control ticket prices, launch and expiration dates, and could add trailers, merchandise and social media tie-ins.

“Any [content] that would require someone to purchase tickets can now be streamed directly into the home,” Xcinex CEO Cihan Atkin told M&E Daily last year. “The reason this has never been able to be done before, and why the market is flooded with subscription models, is because there hasn’t been a way to detect the number of people in the room.”

Like The Screening Room, Xcinex relies on a specially designed set-top box. The Xcinex device has imaging modules in it, taking images of the room, and analyzing what it sees, with the number of people detected sent back to a server. Using thermal imaging, the device has proven to be more than 95% accurate in terms of detecting the correct number of people in the room, and being able to distinguish between adults and children or large pets, Atkin said

The device also utilizes pattern and object recognition and reflective-lens technology to detect any recording devices present in the room, “and if such things are detected, the content stream is paused, and the user is prompted to remove that object from the room,” Atkin said.

A spokeswoman for Xcinex declined to comment on whether the company has any connection with The Screening Room or its backers.