If you're a studio executive or movie theater owner, you'll make more money in the long run. The cost to deliver movies will be significantly less. Film prints cost thousands of dollars to produce and are cumbersome to ship. Digital movies can be downloaded from a remote server, or shipped on a hard drive.

Also, digital movie projection lends itself rather nicely to 3-D movies. If theaters can offer moviegoers a decidedly more immersive experience than they can get at home, they'll possess a powerful tool for fighting a decades-long slump in movie ticket sales.

If you're a movie theater projectionist, then you might be S.O.L. Digital projection will require far less hands-on effort than good, old-fashioned film projection. There won't be reels of film to splice together and thread through a slew of tiny sprockets. Instead, movies and trailers will be queued up and scheduled to run in a playlist akin to what you'd find on your iPod.

But, take heart. Most theater projectionists I've known have been frustrated or aspiring filmmakers at heart. Barring any byzantine contractual obligations the studios and theaters might dream up, you should theoretically have an easier time getting your movies up there on the big screen. You can shoot on digital video, edit it on your computer and provide your neighborhood theater with a digital copy of the finished project.

Stick that in your Redbox and smoke it.

Dr. Humayun Bakht completed his Ph.D at the School of Computing and Mathematics in Liverpool at John Moores University. Prior to his current course of studies, he has successfully completed his MSc Software Engineering and BSc Electronics Engineering from University of Liverpool UK and Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology in Karachi, Pakistan. Humayun's research interest is mobile ad-hoc networks, in particular, the development of a new routing algorithm for this type of networking. He can be reached at humayunbakht@yahoo.co.uk and you can visit his Web site at http://www.geocities.com/humayunbakht/.