Digital Cinema or What Happens to the Dispositif?

Abstract

Created in 2005 by the Digital Cinema Initiatives—a group of Hollywood majors that formed a joint venture in 2002,—the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) is a wrapper containing images, sound, subtitles, and metadata. Six studios got together to agree on internationally valid norms (“DCI specifications”) to ensure that their movies would be screened in 2K/ 4K and compressed in JPEG 2000. The initiative also strove to protect movies against copyright infringement and to assert total control over the movies’ distribution via a decryption code, the key delivery message (KDM), without which the encrypted content could not be accessed. The KDM is a rental license that allows projection under specific conditions.