[Reader-list] changing map of film exhibition

[Ravikant]

Some people had predicted this a couple of years ago. It has been happening 
for a while and may completely change the idea of both exhibition and 
control, I think. Enjoy!

Ravikant
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Source: http://www.hindu.com/2004/06/18/stories/2004061803621300.htm


 India, world leader in e-cinema 


By Anand Parthasarathy 


SINGAPORE, JUNE 17. A summit on digital cinema has revealed a surprising and 
little known fact that India is the world leader in the cutting edge of 
e-cinema - digitally delivered and exhibited. 


At the "BroadcastAsia 200" Conference here on Wednesday, Sunil Patil, chief 
executive officer of the Mumbai-based Adlabs Films, said that over 130 cinema 
theatres, most of them in the small towns of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, 
Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Gujarat, had changed over from film-based 
systems and were exhibiting their fare using digital projectors backed by 
computer servers. Their number was poised to go up to 200 by August when the 
country would have more digital screens than the rest of the world put 
together. July will also see an Indian cinema house - Adlabs' own preview 
theatre in Mumbai - receive the entire movie via satellite direct from the 
processing lab, notching another landmark in digital cinema. 

Since April 2003, one Indian film a week - mostly Hindi - has been released in 
digital format, in addition to the conventional celluloid version. This has 
made India one of the world's first adopters of digital-all-the-way delivery 
and exhibition. 

Other early movers in Asia are China, currently with 57 digital screens, Hong 
Kong, Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan. Host Singapore notched up a world 
first when in May this year, the local Eng Wah organisation inaugurated the 
first-ever digital cinema deployment across five screens of a multiplex - all 
with the maximum quality rating. Thomas Lin, Director Games and Entertainment 
for the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, said the city-state was 
positioning itself to become a hub for all aspects of D-Cinema. 

Chong Man-Nang, chief executive of GDC Technology Ltd., a partner with Adlabs 
and Mukta Arts, for server technology, told The Hindu that units made by the 
company and deployed in India used open systems such as Linux and global 
standards like MPEG-2. 

Brooke Williams of Texas Instruments, whose Digital Light Processor chip fuels 
the digital, explained that the systems were scalable - from the cost 
effective solutions that Adlabs was harnessing, to "2K" systems - jargon for 
projections of 2048 pixels across 1080 pixels, where the quality exceeded the 
best that the old fi-based projectors could deliver. 

The Indian experience of e-cinema, which also translated into affordable 
cinema, was the subject of much discussion here because uniquely among 
nations in the region, the digital drive had received no government support, 
and was very much a home-grown solution. "You have beaten Hollywood at its 
game" said one speaker - a reference to the rather slow pace of acceptance of 
digital cinema in the United States, the country that virtually invented the 
technology.