I was recently thinking about how much better movies in theaters are than streaming, and had the thought: how do such undoubtedly massive files get sent to theaters everywhere?
Some kind of internet transfer could be good since you can just upload once and let whatever theaters need it take it, but the logistics of making some kind of website that can have every movie ever on it and is also completely secret would be horrifying. In addition, the file size and importance of losslessness makes any internet transfer I can think of impractical.
You could also give everyone physical copies of the movie, but that would entail massive shipping costs and effectively bar small theaters from getting all but the very most well funded movies. Producing millions of drives, especially ones with the capacity for your movies, seems like a silly way to run a business as well.
tl;dr full detail, complete movies have way too much detail and there are way too many movie theaters that need to receive them for any distribution process i can think of to work. how do movies get from “file on the last editors computer” to nearly every theater projector in the world having access to it?
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You’re right that the movies are distributed physically. And others will give a better explanation of that.
I want to clarify that the logistics of doing it digitally would actually be much simpler. The streaming websites (eg Netflix) are capable of exactly this and much more. Distributing a movie once per theater, in non-streaming manner is much easier task than distributing a movie in streaming manner on demand to millions of users. Just because the lossless version is much larger doesn’t really factor into this as a logistics question.
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