[Innovation] PayTV System - The SL Cinema Revolution. Only Paying User can see movies

This is an innovative product on SecondLife that will revolutionate Cinemas, Theaters, and the way people can see movies on Second Life worl. Developed by WizardsDesign Studio.

(IT IS NOT based on avatar range (distance), or land pass)

This is a Pay Television that allows you to create payable Theaters, Cinema, or to put simple at home or in other public places.

Only when an avatar Pays the television (you can choose the price), he can see a movies (you choose this too), but the innovation is on the fact that ONLY the avatar that pays can see the movies!! even if there some others players near that don't pay, they can't see the movies, neither the movie URL (infact the URL is not shown in the Parcel Media Properties for both paying and non paying users).

It works with a Brand New System, it don't uses Land Passes, or similar things.... Many users can see the movie on the same television, but only the paying users!, the others can enter the parcel, can see the television, but don't see the movies!

This i've described above is the Lite version of the PayTV, and it is already available (for now you can buy it for 399 L$ contacting Marco Serrati in game or sending an email to [email]siino.marco@gmail.com[/email]).

A more advanced version will come in the next few days, called PayTV Extreme, that allows also to:

- Set more than one movies for a television, so each people can choose the movie to see. Each users can see a different movie at the same time, but as the Lite version, only the paying users can see movies, and movies URL can't be visible for both paying and non paying users.

- Set a different price for each movie

- Very simple Menu Driven Setup, and Menu Driven Movie Selection for the users.

- Upgradable: Service Upgrades are free forever, and you will found it on SLExchange for free. Simple upgrading system.

---

To buy PayTV Lite version for 399 L$ (with copyable permission and modify permission for all thing but the scripts) contact Marco Serrati in game. Soon you can buy it also via the SLExchange website searching for PayTV

You can also pre-order PayTV Extreme for 999 L$ with copyable and modify (but not for the scripts) permissions. You have NOT to pay the price now, but only when the product is ready and we are ready to sell it to you. Contact Marco Serrati in game to pre-order it.

So, lemme get this straight.

The new and exciting development here is ... denial of viewing. Right?

Morg.

I never seen a similar object in second life, here is the innovation...the TVs i seen on cinema/theader allows usually people to pay, and then people receive a land pass to enter the tv area, because what an user see, can be seen (in the old systems) by all the users, so also for the non paying ones. But with this system even if you can see the television, you can't see the movie if you don't pay it. So no land pass require, for a better and elegant cinema / theaters managment. Also with the Extreme version, a single television can stream simultaneusly different movies, one for each paying avatar, at different (or also same if you want) price....all this things are an innovation, aren't them ?

I wouldn't go as far as to say the WHOLE system you describe in new.... the ability to show movies/media to avatars within a range that you can set, that wont show the media/movie to anyone 'nearby' (out of range) has been available for the past 4 months.

Version 1 was called the Proximity Server System which could show upto 7 seperate media streams in the same parcel. So 7 groups of viewers could watch 7 different movies at the same time.

Version 2 is called the Silver Stream Proximity Network which can support 30+ screen/media player combination units over a whole SIM irrespective of parcel/land borders. Each unit comes with its own media controls and playlist, again using a adjustable range sensor.

Both system do not use the land based media facilities, nor can the urls and textures used be seen in the media tab in about world, even in GOD mode, and.. can coexist with land based media settings, so the owner can continue to watch their own broadcasts as normal.

We installed a Silver Stream system into an establishment recently that charged its clients to watch movies available on the playlist, by adding a prim to the front of the screen, which becomes transparent when money is paid to the prim, acheiveing exactly what you describe.

The version 1, BTW, won an award at the International Technology Expo 2007 in SL earlier this year.

Checkout EML-Entertainments in game, or our website http://www.eml-entertainments.com

Interesting, people are finally starting to pick up on the per-avatar-media script facility that was first observed/confirmed/noticed a really really long time ago!

I can't find the thread on a cursory search, but the gist of it is that when setting the parcel media URL in script (or doing a play/stop/etc.), you can specify that the instruction is only for a particular avatar - this allows feeding different media to different people, only sending the media URL to people who've paid, etc.

Wouldn't directly address issues of content theft by people sniffing the media URL once they've paid for it, and then sharing that url with other people.

I didn't doubt that there was innovation here. I merely analysed what the "new" thing was, and found that it was "denial of viewing", a negative. In other words, it introduced a new restriction, rather than a new empowerment.

However, I do now see that there is indeed a new empowerment here, given by the ability for different people to see different content on the same object at the same time. That can be used for good as well as abused for bad of course, but nevertheless it genuinely *IS* a new empowerment.

Of course, the latter empowerment can be imprisoned within a restrictive framework which turns it from empowerment to denial of viewing again, but that's an issue between you and your conscience.

Hopefully we can bring items with this new functionality into the open community soon.

Morg.

Well it does if the 'pay' prim is linked to the server to gain verification, and the media was RSTP streamed, so no cache material to steal off a HD cache.

Yep. I can't find the thread either, but the relevant wiki entry is

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlParcelMediaCommandList

and I guess a typical per-user setting might be

llParcelMediaCommandList([PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT,  agent_uuid_key,
                                         PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_URL,      url_for_this_agent,
                                         PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_PLAY]);

I'll have to try it sometime, not as a means of denying people media access, but as a means of providing them with the media selection that they want individually.

Not pretty without BBcode, sorry, blame LL.

Morg.

No man, what my script does is not what you describe.... i never said my script show movies only to avatar that is within a range, and not show to the far people. With my script the avatar distance doesn't matter..... a non-paying avatar will never see the movie, even if he is very near to the television..... only paying user can see the movies, regardless their distance from television.... definitive, it is not a script based on range, or land pass as i said.

There's actually a patent pending on this technology already:

http://www.VirtualWorldsPPV.com/

Regards,

-Flip

Norman Landing has a cinema that he is almost completed, that uses only one screen, but each viewer can see a different movie. Each seat is HUD controlled and feeds the urls directly to each client, along with the common texture... he has been working on this for almost a year.

Just more variations on the same theme.

And as I said...QUOTE[I wouldn't go as far as to say the WHOLE system you describe in new]

Your variation fits a niche and I wish you success with it.

Oh, I so want to be in that audience:

Hey, did you see that?
Shhhh, they're about to kiss.
What the...? Shoot him! Shoot him!
lmao
*sniff*

=)

"No comment" on the state of the patent system. Some things are just so totally screwed up, it's stranger than fiction.

LL has provided the per-user screen-sharing mechanism in llParcelMediaCommandList(). As I described above, it requires one single function call to implement a per-user viewer.

While people making money through doing almost nothing might indicate commendable efficiency (if one is trying to find something generous to say about it), the fact of the matter is that it's laughable in this case.

Graded "C- ... a pass, but should try harder."

Morg.

Care to provide any examples of your own ingenuity Morg?

For years the old rule of 'one movie per parcel' stuck around.. now through peoples own determination in ignoring the many 'experts' in SL.. there has been a lot of facilities openned up to the many users of SL. What you see here is to be applauded not ridiculed with somewhat pompus sounding 'teacher marking' system you devised. Afterall, if it has always been that 'easy' why has it taken only until recently for people to do it?

I'd think there's clear prior art for this (how long has pay per view been around?), and besides, I think that by uploading something in SL you waive the right to enforce patents on it (it's in the TOS I think).

Don't worry AWM This same argument has come up every time a new script-based feature is added to SL. People accuse scripters of making money by writing "simple" scripts that use the new feature, taking advantage of the requirement to script to use it.

In practice it's just an example of the classic mistake the pointy-haired boss makes - "anything I can't do, must be easy for people who can". I know I've felt that way about building from time to time.

And I've yet to find a new viewer feature that didn't have numerous gotchas that needed to be sorted out before scripts based on it could be released.

Huh?

Just read the man page. LL provided all the information and ingenuity needed.

Those who don't read the documentation can only blame themselves. The facility was there all along, in black and white, and calling one function as documented in the man page isn't what most people call ingenuity.

Morg.

Here is the apparent "innovation," in it's entirety:

integer pay_amount = 100; //for example
string media_url = "http://some.media.url"

money( key ID, integer amount )
{
    if( amount == pay_amount )
    {
    llParcelMediaCommandList( [ PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT, ID, PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_URL, media_url ] );
    }
}

No charge for this one, kiddies.

To be fair, though, if the majority of the "best" scripters aren't doing something you can hardly blame others for reasoning that it must not be possible. Note, I'm not saying they're correct to do so, just that it's reasonable.

Edit: also, the LSL wiki page is actually wrong.



It doesn't specify anything about multiple avatars being allowed to watch multiple movies, so it's not just a matter of not having read the documentation. In fact if anything it's a matter of having trusted the documentation too much.

Yes, I agree with that --- LL's documentation is, in almost all cases and without beating around the bush, pretty threadbare. The bare essentials only in fact, very non-uniform in coverage, and requiring much guesswork and/or interpretation of the full semantics.

As a result, it sometimes requires quite a bit of work to figure out exactly how a given facility works and what are its limits, and filling in the missing information on the wiki.

I'd tend to label that work as remedial engineering though, and not innovation per se. The actual innovation occurred in the head of the LL designer who thought up that per-agent viewing mechanism ... pity that he/she wasn't as hot on documentation as on design though.

Morg.

It was never about actual information provided, more of information NOT provided, coupled with statements, which many took as the SL laws of physics 'One movie per parcel'.

Many of the 'experts' in media in SL that I spent hours with, trying to get them to 'think outside the SL information box' kept reverting to that simple statement. The actual 'law' is one movie per avatar as I interpreted it then, nothing to do with parcels... even that has been broken with the additional facility to compress 6 movie streams into one, and using a special codex (incorporated into the QT player) to seperate those streams, so you can have one avatar watching 6 different movies at the same time.

The innovation, was for those people to question the logic and the 'law' as presented, that have evolved the many systems now being used in SL, without which, most users would all still be huddled round a single parcel screen, and asking why they can't watch a different screen/movie on another floor above their head (not understanding how parcels work)!

To say that people haven't innovated using the code of SL into producing great systems, is like saying the Model T Ford is THE only real car. Give credit where is due.

Indeed. And by the same token, don't give excess credit where it is not due, eg. where a single LSL function call achieves the goal.

Morg.

Moreover, on this occasion it wasn't just threadbare, it was actively false. The documentation actually made the statement that you could have only one movie per parcel, when this was not true.

I must strike off my christmas card list, those who 'discovered' that the world wasn't flat.. as it is only an obvious statement... <sarcasim mode on>

Hey AWM, the server system that you're describing that won the award would be the concept that I told you about nearly a year ago right? The one I made up as a prototype that you used? The one that I couldn't be fussed to put out quickly enough for you so you did it on my behalf and took all the awards too? I'm not bitter, it's cool, I won't go into too much detail about any of my recent concepts though

Never mind eh? You could've quoted my name correctly though, rather than Norman Landing, I thought we knew each other better than that?

Thanks for the mention anyway. We have a temporary cinema in the DTV store in Wainscot now that uses a simple concept where videos are played per avatar once you've paid the screen. It's a very simple set up but it works and is jammed with things to watch at present. The films are kindly provided by BDVD who actually control the screen. That's the beauty of the system; the screen can be owned by anyone and as long as a server is installed in that region then they can show video on that screen. Theoretically I guess the system is limited to the 40 agents that are able to enter Wainscot at a time. I'm assured that BDVD are more than able to deal with the bandwidth, and it's certainly cheaper than renting or buying a movie in the mean time.


The HUD controlled system will come later, it works as it is so there's no rush, it certainly won't make any difference to your viewing experience