Avian’s Blog

NewScientist reports that a Hollywood studio has arranged for their latest movie to be transmitted towards Alpha Centauri.

I'm sure any modestly intelligent life out there is already bored full of Hollywood and their recycled ideas. What's interesting though is that the people doing the transmission had to assure the movie makers that their precious intellectual property could not be intercepted by any resident of Earth. Funny, because as I understand the whole idea of this exercise is to provide the video for free to anyone listening on the other end. Which either means that studios don't believe that planets around our neighboring star are inhabited or that they've already shipped a rocket full of DRM encumbered receivers to them.

The report also says that the transmission will be done by Deep Space Communications Network, a company with a cheesy web site that sends any message to the stars for a price. Not surprisingly, they don't provide any technical details of the broadcast, but they do seem to have their own interesting idea of the prime directive. They say that they will only send NTSC or PAL signal (for which you must prove copyright ownership, of course). I guess any aliens with SECAM sets are out of luck then. Oh, and forget about telling those Klingon p'taks to beat it, because they will not send any offensive materials either.

Finally, note that they aren't NASA's DSN. Those guys have more serious things to do than provide marketing campaigns for movie producers.