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THE FLEXIBLE ENTERPRISE
Movie theaters poised to go digital...almost
By Jorge Sosa
The concept behind movies-on-demand is simple. You order up a movie and it plays on your TV or PC without any physical medium ever changing hands. A server somewhere streams a high-bandwidth rush of information that resolves itself on your screen in the form of, say, a talking chihuahua.
Movie studios have long been hot to deliver their product to theaters that way. Since 2002, Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Bros. have been collaborating to develop uniform standards for digitally delivered and projected cinema.
Technical hurdles have been gradually overcome over the years, but individual theater chains have long been reluctant to adopt digital cinema because of the high cost to retool - up to $150,000 or more per screen.
By 2008, many studios and theater chains finally seemed to be coming toward an agreement. As of last October, two groups representing most of the theater chains in the U.S. planned to raise more than $1.5 billion to convert thousands of screens to digital. The studios planned to help share that cost through virtual print fees. These fees would be paid to theaters based on how many digital movies (calling them "films" hardly makes sense anymore) they showed.
The plan made sense. At least, it did until the worldwide credit crunch made it next to impossible for theater chains to borrow the money to pay for the new digital systems. D'oh! Barring some insanse federal bailout or economic stimulus package tailored specifically for the movie industry, plans for an industry-wide conversion to digital may be delayed at least a couple years.
Speaking to the Boston Globe in December, Dreamworks Animation SKG chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg seemed optimistic that 7,500 theater screens - out of 36,000 theater screens in America - would be digital-ready by May 2010.
Why should you care?
If you're a diehard cinephile, the prospect of going to the movies in a digital era could either excite or annoy you. There's a certain charm in enjoying a form of entertainment based on an underlying technology that hasn't changed in more than 100 years. Celluloid film, like vinyl records, will always offer a qualitatively different experience than the digital medium.
But, like vinyl records, film prints are fragile and degrade with use. With each showing, a film print picks up scratches. Over time, film prints fade. A digital presentation should look equally great (or awful, if we're talking a Uwe Boll movie) every time its played.
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