First day at work - I manage not to break anything

It's been my first day as Director of Digital Business Development here at Deluxe Europe and so far, so good. I can't say that I've come up with a grand digital strategy for the company, but nobody has been on my back about submitting a proposal and two-hour PowerPoint to go with it - yet. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

I'm sitting in a very nice office that I will sadly have to vacate when George Ilko, Technical Director Deluxe Digital Services Europe, returns from holiday next week. It's a bit of musical chairs here at the moment as the three co-habiting entities that are Capital FX, EFILM London and Deluxe Digital re-organise themselves across the three floors here at Dering Street in London's Mayfair, next door to Soho.

It's raining outside, as it should in London but hasn't pretty much the whole dry summer, and I'm wondering about the limits of blogging and what to write, being new to this whole thing.

Don't expect this to be a Robert Scoble type of blog, as a) I don't know enough in detail about Deluxe to be offering those types of critiques, and b) Deluxe is a much nicer company than Microsoft and Steve Bergman has a much better dress sense than Bill Gates. Also, don't expect this to be a resurrection of the E-Cinema Alert. I'm not a fan of re-makes of things that were perfectly fine the first time around. So instead I will have to find a balance between a format that makes this interesting and revealing enough for you to be coming back for more, while at the same time keeping me from making an arse of myself electronically.

Here's a starter for ten that's recently been doing my head in. In the US the distributor pays for the distribution of the film, be it 35mm or digital, as the name would suggest. In Europe, however, I've found out that it is typically the exhibitor who pays for a driver to go to the depot and pick up the film canisters. Only in exceptional circumstances does a studio/distributor pay, such as this summer when an under-performing blockbuster was shipped in two separate batches to minimise the piracy risk. So security is obviously something that studios/distributors will pay for, so key handling/delivery is on their tab. But at the same time, you can't expect cinema owners to be paying for satellite transponder capacity or be told by the FedEx person that they won't be handing over the hard drive until they pay up. So it would make sense for distributors to either pay and recoup the money from exhibitors through changes in the rental terms, or just pay and accept that this is an inevitable fact of digital life.

But something tells me that it won't be quite that simple in this European market of dozens of countries, hundreds of distributors and too many exhibitor operators to count. That's part of what I've let myself in for. Oh, brave new digital cinema world! I'm off to ballroom dance class.