Night of the Long Knives at QuVis

News reaches me that there has been a major "reorganisation" at QuVis; the euphemism for a lot of good people getting the sack, in this case. It seems like some of my oldest and dearest colleagues, such as Jim Graham and Joel Schiffman, are no longer part of the new QuVis (www.quvis.com). This is sad because QuVis was a great pioneering company that did a lot of good, particularly in the early years of digital cinema. Obviously there is no press release heralding this change, so I go on the word of people with good contacts, though I have not spoken to anyone at QuVis.

Such a change will obviously have major impact on the UK Film Council's Digital Screen Network, now more than half way through its deployment. Does this make the upgrade to USB 2.0 interface more or less likely to come soon? If anything, I would think that Fiona et al at Arts Alliance would be digging around for Patrick Zuchetta's business card to see if he would be prepared to cut them a deal for 100 Doremi units, with a possible swap out of the old QuVis units down the line. I am not saying that this is what they should do. I am simply speculating about what they might want to do.

It is too soon to write off QuVis. The company still has a strong foothold in Korea, Japan and the UK, but they lost out in the early race in the USA to Doremi when AccessIT selected the French server maker for it's Christie/AIX network. Not upgrading fast enough to USB 2.0, lateness in implamenting watermarking and other issues meant that there many of Deluxe's clients were in no rush to supply content to their servers. It was common knowledge that there were too many server makers pushing into the small digital cinema market, but I had not anticipated that QuVis would the first to stumble. I do wish both QuVis and the ex-QuVis guys good luck.