Movies in the Classroom

 Anytime a teacher wants to show a movie in class, it generates immediate excitement from the kids! It doesn't matter if it's something purely educational or if it's for fun or a class reward, there's something about watching a movie at school that is fun -- maybe it feels like it's out of the ordinary, bringing a little bit of what we do for fun at home into the classroom. If you're a bit older, you may remember how excited you were when you walked into the classroom and saw this set up:

Now, we don't have to set up that contraption anymore -- we have streaming services! Hello, Apple TV, iTunes Movies, Netflix, Hulu, Disney +, Amazon Prime, etc.!

But wait. Not really.

Those subscription streaming services we use at home don't always carry over into use in the classroom. How come?

It's called High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). What this does, in the simplest terms, is prevent copying of digital audio and video as it travels across connections. Content is encoded to check to see if it is streaming through connections to see if they have the right permissions to play HDCP encrypted content. If it doesn't, then it won't play. In order for a connection to be HDCP compliant, it requires the manufacturer of the connection devices to obtain and pay for licensing. As you can imagine, many manufacturers don't want to do that because, frankly, it's of no financial benefit to them.

This all means that when you want to show a movie from a streaming service, even if it is for purely educational purposes, chances are it won't play for you here at school. Even if you're signing in with a personal account. It all has to do with the encoding and encryption in the content being streamed.

What it all boils down to is copyright. Technically, when we show a movie in class, it is considered a public displaying of that film, and that scary FBI warning at the beginning of a movie and the copyright information at the end basically say we can't do public showings of the films. 

So, how do you get around this? Well, the official answer would be you don't. Unless you go through the steps of being able to get the appropriate licensing to be able to have public showings of films.

The unofficial answer is get an external DVD player and show it that way. It bypasses the HDCP encryption (but if we are being 100% transparent, it's technically also violating copyright, so do with that information what you will).