Universal Studios say dont do it Anton

I've heard back from the licensing department at Universal Studios and in no uncertain terms, they say stop.

Follows is the email I sent and their reply. It does seem odd that they don't have a signature on their email or directions on how to do it legally.


"
-----Original Message-----
From: Lubliner, Roni (NBC Universal) [mailto:xxxxxxx@XXXXXXX]
Sent: Tuesday, 30 December 2008 4:55 AM
To: Anton Winter
Subject: RE: movie trailer copyright question
For your own legal safety, you shouldn't embark on this with Universal or any other film studio.


-----Original Message-----
From: Anton Winter [mailto:xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2008 4:17 PM
To: Lubliner, Roni (NBC Universal)
Subject: movie trailer copyright question


Hello,



I have recently set up what can be termed an “online” tv station.

www.worldtv.com/movietrailers

The system plays movie trailers for upcoming blockbusters. Many of them are from Universal.

The majority of the trailers I have found on youtube.

With regards to Universals policies, is what I am doing permitted?

If it is not permitted, what do I need to do to get permission? Please note, this is not a large commercial venture, it is simply a hobby website.

Anton Winter
"

first contact with Universal Studios

The internet tv station I have set up at www.worldtv.com/movietrailers is starting to get a few users now.

The last thing that i want is to loose my house if it is illegal to run it.

I spend a large amount of time researching copyright issues on the internet, and I have no idea if playing movie trailers via worldtv.com and youtube is legal.

So I thought i would ask the experts.

Firstly I asked worldtv.com for their opinion. basically i asked if i am going to be sued. Here is their reply

"
Hi Anton,

You should abide by the relevant YouTube Terms and Conditions and WorldTV Terms and Conditions http://worldtv.com/pages/terms/ but with many movie trailers not being copyrighted and the fact that such trailers promote the movies you should be ok.

Thanks,

WorldTV
"


My opinion on their reply is that they are probably incorrect on the "movie trailers not being copyrighted"

They may be right on the "trailers promote the movies you should be ok". However simply promoting something does not mean that it complies with copyright "fair use"


So to try and find out for sure, I have sent off my first email to Universal Studioes licensing division to get their input.

I wait with anticipation for thier reply.

wpf solution

In my previous post i talked about running into a WPF performance problem. I had several thousand controls that i added to a stackpanel. the choke point was the stackpanel.children.add function.

Adding 10,000 items was taking around about 10 seconds to run. 8.5 seconds was spent on the stackpanel.children.add. around 1.5 seconds was spent on creating the controls.

To fix the problem I have used a variation on the WPF virtualizingstackpanel. The theory behind virtualizing stackpanels is that the stackpanel only initialises and displays the items that are actually on screen. When the stackpanel has to show new gui elements, it creates the new elements and distroys any that are no longer on screen.

The 2 engineering problems this brings up are 1- how to work out what is on screen and 2 how to store all the objects that may be potentially turned into gui elements.

For my project, i have a tv guide that has 100's of tv stations and each one needs 1 weeks worth of guide data.

To store the data i have essentially made a big 2d array.

When the user scrolls the guide, new gui elements are created on the fly and added to the stackpanel.

The resulting code now takes less than 100 milliseconds to load up rather than 10 seconds.

So that gives a speed up of around 100 times.

Build a tv station in 20 minutes - and not get sued

One of the big challenges media companies are going to face soon is the ability for anyone to create an online tv station.

I have just launched my own online tv station that shows all the latest hollywood movie blockbuster movie trailers. Right now the video is low resolution, but as I find HD content I will add it in.

www.worldtv.com/movietrailers

I've also created a widget for it so you can put it directly into facebook or myspace.

http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/movie-trailers-puckpuckpuck

day 1 and 5 people have embedded the widget in their websites.

WPF gotcha stackpanel.children.add

I havent blogged for a while because i've been working on integrated live tv tuning and WPF into my media player. This has not been a trivial task. Getting access to the directshow filter graph to manually build the graph is not something that WPF was designed for. More on this on a later blog.

Todays note is a problem that i have run into in dynamically constructing a large GUI in WPF. i have around about 10,000 custom controls that are added to a stackpanel. ( the custom controls each represent a tv show in a TV guide ).

Constructing and populating the custom controls is pretty quick. Adding them to the stackpanel is a problem. 10,000 controls take about 10 seconds to add. This is way to slow for my liking. My first thought was to move it into a worker thread, however because WPF is STA and adding anything to the GUI has to be done on the main thread, the way to do this isn't obvious. Once I have found a solution, I'll post it up here.

WCF Gotcha

For the most part, WCF is pretty well behaved, especially when you use the default settings. Things just seem to work.

I have had some WCF code that has been working flawlessly for the last month. Then all of a sudden the client can't access the server.

I get the standard WCF fault error messages and start to wade through the countless websites on tracing WCF errors.

After stuffing around with half a dozen or so suggestions without success, I find a gotcha that is easily fixed, but super difficult to avoid or detect.

When you use the default windows authentication on WCF under wsHTTPbinding, it takes into consideration the timestamp on the messages being sent.
If your 2 computers have clocks that are more than 5 minutes out, then the authentication will fail and WCF will throw errors.

I had accidently adjusted the day when I had last clicked on the clock on one of my machines and now of course the timestamps didn't match.

It took me several hours to work it out. I hope this post helps out anyone that runs into the same problem.

a whole heap more WCF authentication information can be found here
http://kjellsj.blogspot.com/2007/01/wcf-security-wshttpbinding-with.html

Video wall

Pretty cool video wall. It opens in a new browser window.