A couple weeks ago, I saw a TikTok video that blew my mind, leading me down multiple rabbit holes, starting with the epiphany that marbles are made on a marble run?! What an exciting way to be born.
The first thing I wondered about was the background music of the video, which came from a channel of Chinese industrial videos and seemed like a strange match even for TikTok.
Some digging led me to 77-year-old German musician Achim Reichel’s “Aloha Heja He,” a pop-rock sea shanty that was a hit for him in the early 1990s, one of several albums of sea shanties he’d recorded since the 1970s.
It’s Oscar night! And for the second year in a row, every single Oscar-nominated film has leaked in HD quality before the ceremony, but only three of the 32 nominated films leaked as Oscar screeners, a radical change from years past. What the hell is going on?
Back in 2004, I started tracking the illicit distribution of Oscar screeners because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was seemingly in denial, or completely unaware, that virtually every nominated film routinely leaked online. (The L.A. Times headline that inspired it still makes me laugh.)
That project turned into an annual ritual where I’d wake up on the day the nominees were announced and add to a spreadsheet now covering 643 Oscar nominees across 20 years and write up my analysis about the trends that emerged from the data.
Continuing the trend from last year, we can see the pandemic accelerating a rapid decline of interest in screeners. Let’s take a look at the data to see why.
Death of the Screener
Screeners, as we know them, are dead. But not for the reasons you might think.
Last year, the Academy announced they were finally banning physical screeners. Voters would no longer receive DVDs or Blu-Rays by mail, with screeners exclusively available through Academy Screening Room, a free video streaming app for iOS, Apple TV, and Roku accessible only by Oscar voters.
Screenshot of the Academy Screening Room app for Roku
Studios and filmmakers are charged $12,500 for inclusion in Academy Screening Room and an additional $5,000 fee for optional forensic watermarking, and required to follow rigid technical specifications for video, audio, captioning, and art. (Animated features, international films, documentaries, and shorts are exempt from the fee.) Presumably, this is still much cheaper for studios than producing and distributing physical screeners to all 9,487 eligible voting members, especially when individually watermarking to discourage piracy.
With so many voters still avoiding theaters because of the Omicron variant, and without the option of physical screeners, it’s safe to say that virtually every Academy voter was using Academy Screening Room this year. Over 160 films from 2021 were available in Academy Screening Room, including every eventual Oscar nominee.
With all this DRM and forensic watermarking, could this spell the end of leaked digital screeners forever? If history is any guide, no. Historically, any DRM and watermarking can be defeated or bypassed, often with a surprisingly trivial amount of effort, if there’s demand for what it’s protecting.
Screeners aren’t dead in the piracy scene because physical screeners are gone, or because digital screeners are any harder to pirate. They’re dead because nobody cares about them anymore.
Screeners Are Irrelevant
There are two trends we can see over the last few years that have transformed how films are leaked online, and both of these radically accelerated during the pandemic.
Fewer screeners are leaking than ever. Only three nominated screeners have leaked in each of the last two years, 9% of nominees compared to 80-90% 20 years ago and 30-50% pre-pandemic.
Nominated films leak faster than ever. It used to take a median 10-11 weeks for the first high-quality leak of a movie online. The median for the last two years has been between 1-3 weeks.
As I noted last year, the pandemic destroyed the traditional release window between theatrical and streaming/video-on-demand dates. Movies used to have a theatrical window of exclusivity, typically 75 to 90 days, enforced by deals with theater owners. These windows vanished during the pandemic as box office ticket sales cratered, either because theaters were closed or people were just staying home.
Studios and streaming platforms opted instead for streaming-only releases, or they were released simultaneously in theaters and online as “day-and-date” releases, to Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Paramount+, or other streaming platforms.
The result was that every film leaked online in HD format from streaming/video-on-demand platforms before Oscar screeners were even released, rendering screeners effectively useless.
To be clear, this is continuing a trend that started long before the pandemic. We can see the impact of tightening release windows starting in 2015, but their decreasing desirability started in 2009, first driven by demand for higher-quality video than DVD screeners could provide and then by the ubiquity of streaming platforms.
The Rebirth of Screeners
20 years in, I’m tempted to end the project. It feels like a good stopping point. It’s clear that pirates won this fight, and as far as pirates are concerned, screeners are now largely irrelevant.
And yet, I’m still very curious what will happen when the worst effects of the pandemic on the film industry subside. Studios are planning to return to theatrical windows this year, though with an emerging industry standard of 45 days, down from the 75- to 90-day windows of the past.
It seems likely the gap between theatrical and streaming release dates will start to rise again, creating more pressure and demand for screeners. The Academy is putting a lot of faith in their technology for Academy Screening Room, but it feels like the only thing saving them right now is a lack of interest in what they’re protecting.
If that changes, the attention of every scene release group in the world will turn to getting access to an Academy Screener Room account, defeating its DRM, and removing any digital watermarks. The first to unlock it will find itself in possession of an incredible treasure chest: instant access to every screener submitted “for your consideration.”
So maybe I’ll keep this going a little longer to see what happens. Grab some popcorn, enjoy the show, and I’ll see you next year. 🍿🏴☠️
As you may remember, I’ve spent the last few months working on Skittish, a playful space for virtual events and gatherings of all kinds — requiring only a browser and microphone, using spatial 3D audio to talk to others around you. Skittish was built in a 3D engine with a powerful but simple editor, making it easy to customize the world.
It took some time, but I’m happy to say Skittish is now open to everyone, along with a new homepage and public demo showing how it works. Anyone and everyone can now create their own world, start editing, and invite others to join you. Go try it out!
Huge thanks to all the beta testers, event organizers, and creators who used Skittish over the last few months, but special thanks to the XOXO community for their continued support and enthusiasm.
And extra extra special thanks to Simon Hales, lead engineer for the project, for everything he’s done to make using Skittish (and working on it) so joyful.
Pardon the extremely-specific post, but I’ve found myself at the center of a bizarre case of mistaken identity and writing publicly about it seemed like the best option to stop it.
Someone with the email address ‘[email protected]’ is emailing small independent online product manufacturers with an identical scam: they’re a huge fan of their products, but cut themselves on the packaging while opening it, and want a refund and damages. Screenshots of two examples are below, minus the photo of a gross bloody finger.
These companies are then contacting me via Twitter, Instagram, and email because they think that I’m the one that sent it. What gave them that impression? Well, take a look for yourself at the Google results when searching for that email address.
Despite the keyword “virodome17” not appearing anywhere on those pages, Google not only returns my 2016 tweets about Gmail’s “mic drop” April Fool’s joke, but also my LinkedIn page.
Combine this with the fact that the scammer signs his name “Andy,” and you can see where anyone would get the wrong idea that I was the sender. Is the scammer even impersonating me? It’s hard to say — “Andy” is a common name, and they’re not using my last name or any other aspect of my identity. They also don’t have control over what pages the Google algorithm returns, so it’s plausible this is just a bizarre coincidence.
Regardless, Google is ultimately responsible in two ways:
The Google algorithm is irrelevantly returning my personal information for a completely unrelated search, leading to this identity mixup.
Despite multiple reports to Gmail of fraudulent activity over the last year, the [email protected] is still actively attempting to defraud others with a Gmail account. I received two separate companies contacting me about this issue in the last 24 hours alone.
My hope is that Google indexes this blog post and it starts showing prominently for anyone searching for the scammer’s “[email protected]” address. But if you work on Gmail or Google Search, it’d be amazing if you could do something about it.
If you’re a company that received this scam and found this page, please post a comment about your experience. I’d love to see more screenshots, and I’ll post an update here if anything changes.
We were one of the companies that they emailed, as a company with glass jars we were extremely alarmed. We went through the same search process + thought it was you and have been checking your twitter every 15 minutes. Thank you for posting this, we would still be on high alert.
As a fun linguistics side note, I was curious about how both emails end with “do the needful,” a turn-of-phrase I’ve never heard before. Digging into it, this expression is apparently popular in India but rarely used outside of it, meaning “do the right thing.” The Guardian calls it “the granddaddy of all Indianisms,” so I think I have a pretty good hunch where this scammer’s from.
Update: Another company reached out to me on Twitter with the same experience, and I’ve confirmed privately they were using the same template scam. Multiple Google employees also contacted me privately to say they’ve escalated this search ranking issue, so I hope this will be resolved soon.
In the comments, yet another company the scammer contacted noted that the Gmail account is now bouncing, indicating Google’s taken action against it.
And, as predicted, the #1 Google result for [email protected] searches is now this post.
I doubt this will put an end to the scam, but it’ll hopefully end my role in it.
