This seems another of those rather dangerous ideas that studio executives latch onto to keep up the pretence of earning their salary
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17105&ch=biztechThe movie industry has a problem. According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Hollywood loses billions of dollars a year on illegally sold copies of movies. The losses are impossible to calculate accurately, of course, since it's unclear how many of the people who download copies over the Internet or pay a few dollars for a pirated DVD would have paid $9 to $20 for a theatre ticket or legal DVD.
Paris-based Thomson Corporation, which provides technology to the entertainment and media industry, is exploring methods for thwarting at least one type of bootlegger: the covert camcorder user. The company's technique involves inserting "artifacts" -- extra frames, flashes of light, or pixelated grid patterns -- into a movie during its digital-processing phase, before it's shipped to theatres. The goal is to mar a camcorder recording without degrading the images moviegoers see, says Jian Zhao, chief technology officer of subsidiary Thomson Content Security in Burbank, CA.
In addition to the frame-insertion technique, Thomson is working on incorporating additional sabotaging mechanisms into its system, such as projecting ultraviolet or infrared light onto the screen and washing out camcorder pictures. Aware that the easy counter-measure to this is simply to place a filter over a camcorder's lens, Zhao says their system is being designed to combine many different wavelengths, so that finding the perfect filter would be difficult.
So what are we being told here , last month we where told of a potentially blinding laser being used to target camcorders, and now we are going to be bombarded by infra red and ultravoilet light sources at unknown frequency, and worst of all, subliminal messaging that has been outlawed worldwide as a brainwashing technique, something stinks here and if this is how they treat movie goers I hope they see a decline in numbers as people vote with their feet to avoid potential blindness and epileptic seizures.
Be on the alert folks, did you really want to eat that popcorn in the cinema or where you "told" to ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_messageJames Vicary, a market researcher, claimed in 1957 that quickly flashing messages such as "drink Coca-Cola" and "eat popcorn" on a movie screen would influence people to purchase more food and drink. This led to a public outcry and many conspiracy theories of governments and cults using the technique to their advantage. The practice was subsequently banned in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. In 1962, Vicary admitted that he fabricated his claim (Boese 2002:137-38).
In 1973, Wilson Bryan Key's book Subliminal Seduction claimed that subliminal techniques were widely used in advertising. The book contributed to a general climate of fear with regard to Orwellian dangers of subliminal messaging. Public concern was sufficient to cause the Federal Communications Commission to hold hearings and to declare subliminal advertising "contrary to the public interest".
All joking aside I think this whole episode shows that rather than work on improving the normally enjoyable social cinema experience they are penalising all visitors in an effort to catch the 1 in a million, and that is about the right figure for this acivity.
