MyDigitalCinema

Namaste Cannes, nous somme Reliance

2010-05-06T08:50:00.007+01:00

Reliance MediaWorks will have a major presence at this year's Cannes Film Festival for the first time ever. Not content with hanging out in the Indian pavillion, walking up and down the Croisette or shuffling aimlessly around the Palaise, we have taken over a large suite overlooking both the Croisette and Palaise where we will be showcasing some of the amazing things that RMW offers its film and media clients, such as restoration, image processing and 2D-to-3D conversion. We will be doing one-on-ones with journalists, film makers and other movers and shakers attending. We are also thrilled to have one of the films we did restoration on (Khandahar) is playing as part of the festival.

All of this was deemed significantly important for Screen International to do a major write up on us:

Reliance MediaWorks Ltd., the services company of the Reliance ADA group, will be in Cannes to host an open house each day for the industry. Industry members can drop in any time to the Reliance office (Relais de la Reine, 42/43 La Croisette, Suite C-61) to learn more about the services offered by RMW. Special press and group demonstrations will be held Wednesday 3-5, Thursday 12-2, Friday 3-5, Saturday 3-5, Sunday 12-2, and Monday 12-2pm.
Anil Arjun, CEO of Reliance MediaWorks, tells Screen: “What we plan to do really do a preview show, is to show showcase of MediaWorks capabilities in the global space. We wanted to do an open house, encouraging the industry to interact with our team there.”
Some of the senior executives from RMW will be attending Cannes. Reliance the parent company has had a strong presence in Cannes in previous years, but this is the first year that MediaWorks has a presence this large.

So now you also know where to find us. Do stop by and visit us - just look for the big banner that says Reliance MediaWorks, together with our partners In-Three.

Reliance Big Entertainment has had a significant presence there in past years, using the festival as its launch pad for major Bollywood and hollywood projects. But, no , we definitely can't get your script to Steven Spielberg. Yes, he has a deal with Reliance ADAG, but I very much doubt that he will stop by our suite as he is busy preparing for his next film with DreamWorks.

I've been promoted to Head of Strategy - awsome!

2010-05-05T08:40:00.004+01:00

I'm taking a break from my blogging break to share with you the news that I've been promoted to Head of Strategy for film & media services global - something that I'm both thrilled about and humbled by - here at Reliance MediaWorks.

I started out as a consultant to Adlabs (as it was known back then) back in October 2007 to set up the company's digital cinema operation (mastering, cinema deployment and connectivity) and six months later became a full time employee, heading up the digital cinema department as COO. It was a tremendous learning process and experience, effectively bringing DCI-grade digital cinema to the world's largest film and cinema market with the country's leading company - largest lab, largest cinema chain, largest-you-name-it.

Thanks to a great team and a visionary and supportive management we pioneered everything from an Indian VPF model, 2K and 4K technology and FACT/MPAA-grade security to 3D and optical fibre delivery in India and to US. We have done hundreds of films and are now the preferred and trusted partner of both Indian studios as well as Hollywood studios working in India. This operation now largely runs itself with little requirement for me to handle day-to-day business, which is also why it is being integrated with our film lab and DI operation, to give our clients a more seamless end-to-end service proposition.

In the meantime, I had become closely involved in several of our new services ventures and international expansions, including the acquisition of Lowry Digital, the partnership with In-Three and the setting up of a London base, as well as pushing the boundaries of what we can do with our global fibre optic delivery network. Again, none of this I did myself or single handed, but by working together with my Reliance colleagues and industry contacts.

It is said that 'luck' is 'preparation' meets 'opportunity', which is why I feel that I've been lucky in that my years at Screen Digest, Unique and Deluxe were the best possible preparation for the opportunity that the transformation of India into a major global power, including the 'soft power' of film and media, represents. Tectonic plates are shifting when it comes to the global film, television, on-line and mobile media market today and India's impact will be no lesser than when the Indian subcontinent crashed into the Euro-Asian continent and threw up the Himalayas.

So where does Reliance MediaWorks go from here and what the hell will I contribute to that? Obviously we are getting into the tricky "forward looking statements" territory that all publicly listed companies have to tread carefully around. But we have already demonstrated the are building to scale in India to support unique skills and services world wide. We never take the "me-too" approach to anything we do, but focus on 'next generation' services and how to do things differently or better than anybody else. Rest assured that we will continue pushing the boundaries, to implement projects that would daunt others with the sheer size, continue focusing on cutting edge technologies and proprietary solutions developed by ourselves and work every day to earn the trust and business of our industry client, creatives, customers, studios and partners. Drop me a line or give me a call.

See you next at the Cannes Film Festival, where we will have a major presence, showcasing just a few of the many things we do.

Reliance partners In-Three for world's largest 2D-to-3D conversion operation

2009-12-07T05:41:00.004Z

More than five years ago I was at ShoWest 2004 in Las Vegas when a contact told me about a secret demo that was taking place, away from the cinema trade show itself, in a hotel room in Flamingo. "These guys have converted regular films to 3D," I was told breathlessly. I managed to secure an invite and was escorted into a mid-size hotel room with an oversized 2K projector taking up most of the space, as well as a few chairs and a screen.

I had been covering the digital cinema the industry long enough to have developed a healthy skepticism toward tall new claims, but what I saw that night blew me away: 3D clips of films such as "2001: A Space Odyssey", "12 Angry Men", "Casablanca", the original "Star Wars" and many more classics. And they all - worked. The 3D did not look fake, gimmicky or tacky in a 'colorization' sort of way. It looked as if the director had intended the film to be stereoscopic in the first place and I found myself wanting to watch the films again, this time in 3D. That was my first introduction to In-Three. I could not write about it in my E-Cinema Alert newsletter, but I knew that the company was onto something great.

Fast forward three and a half years and I'm having dinner at an Indonesian restaurant in Amsterdam during IBC 2007 with my friend and mentor Richard Wolfe, where he also invited and introduced me to Neil Feldman, the CEO of In-Three. The digital cinema deployment was spluttering, the 3D deployments were just starting and "Avatar" was in the early pre-production stages.

Neil told me more about In-Three, the Dimensionalization(R) process and projects they had worked on and were in the pipeline. I also realized that Neil stood out as one of the sharpest and most visionary business men - in an industry that is not exactly short of that type - while also having a tremendous amount of warmth and generosity of spirit. A rare combination. While In-Three had not yet come out with its first full-length feature film, it made me appreciate that Neil and In-Three were in this for the long haul, something that was confirmed when I subsequently got to visit his facility in Westlake Village, around the time that we acquired Lowry Digital, and saw some of the latest footage and examples of their work.

It is thus with tremendous excitement that I can finally share the news that Reliance MediaWorks is partnering In-Three to create the world's largest 2D-to-3D conversion facility, right here in Mumabi, able to cater to 15-25 projects per year, once it is fully up and running. Making this possible was a true team effort on both our side and In-Three's side. You can read more about it in this article from Wall Street Journal:

Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA Group is partnering with a Los Angeles company to produce 3-D movies out of a new 1,000-person facility in Mumbai that will be the largest of its kind in the world.
Reliance and In-Three Inc. will convert 15 to 25 feature films per year from regular two-dimensional format to 3-D, the companies say. Reliance's planned $40 million facility, which is scheduled to open in January, will house the 3-D operations along with other film services it already provides, such as post-production, visual effects and restoration of classics.

But even more depth is provided (as so often) by Carolyn Giardina in The Hollywood Reporter:

"We feel next year is going to a big year for 3D for theaters and the home," said Neil Feldman, CEO of In-Three, which recently worked on Disney's 3D "G-Force." "We anticipate such a large volume of work that we need capacity, and that is where Reliance comes in. We are setting this up in advance."

Slated to launch in February, the operation intends to hire hundreds of employees -- possibly as many as 600 -- during its first year. They will be trained and equipped to handle 15-25 feature film projects a year. Further out, the companies expect the staff to number in the thousands.

The companies said that work on the first joint title will commence early next year, with several more projects planned for a start in the year's first half. Titles were not disclosed.

The number of 3D cinema screens worldwide recently topped 6,000, and the transition continues to move forward albeit at a slower pace than many had hoped. It is expected that the first projects from the facility will include new features and legacy titles as well as theatrical commercials.

There has also been coverage in the Economic Times and Reuters, with more set to follow no doubt. And if you have not seen it already, make sure to watch Disney/Bruckheimer's "G-Force" to appreciate the power of 2D-to-3D conversion and why In-Three stands head and shoulders above all other companies in this field. Watch this space for future fruits of our joint labour.

Our finances are looking up

2009-10-27T07:20:00.003Z

Reliance MediaWorks still turned a small loss for the most recent quarter, but a significant improvement on the previous quarter and the outlook is very rosy, as this interview in ET with our CEO Anil Arjun makes clear. Some key stats:

How would the remainder of the year pan out for entertainment players?

You have to look at it in perspective. When we spoke about it last quarter I talked about the resolutions of the issues; we have seen an 80% growth in this quarter in terms of our topline itself. Now if I look at the market performance in terms of the box-office, like I said, it has been a 20% growth in terms of box-office. What is important is that the realisation per film has increased by about 38%. If you look at numbers like for instance the wide release films, which are about the 500 print release, it has been about a 68% increase in topline.

You are still at a net loss level of about Rs 11 crore, while revenues have jumped. When do you start to see the bottomline becoming profitable?

We have seen a major improvement between Q1 and Q2, in fact our EBITDA from operations was a minus Rs 9 crore in Q1, and it has grown to Rs 35 crore in Q2; our loss was about Rs 65 crore and it is now down to Rs 11 crore. A lot of that has been attributed to the depreciation in the interest cost because we went through a very large capital expansion in the past one year. I see a lot of gain flowing from Q3 onwards. Clearly by the third-fourth quarters will reflect positively on our topline and bottomline.

The war chest of INR 600 Cr (US$ 130m) will enable us to do some spectacular thing in the second half of this financial year. Stay tuned for details.

Apparently we are the 25th biggest cinema chain in the US

2009-10-26T10:05:00.004Z

A good article from the LA Times that gives an overview of our cinema chain in the US. There is even mention of what we are doing on the digital front:

Seeking to upgrade the experience and the environment, Big Cinemas is spending $12 million to renovate theaters -- many of which it acquired from mom-and-pop operators -- with new digital projectors and sound systems, computerized accounting controls, stadium seating and concession stands serving Indian food.

...

Reliance reached out to Indian film distributors, offering to act as a "one-stop shop" to deliver their movies across the U.S. via a company-owned fiber-optic network that pipes films directly from Mumbai to New York. That assures quicker and cheaper distribution than in the past, when canisters of film would have to be flown in and could get held up in customs, causing costly delays.

The Hindi films are subtitles, so any of you non-Indians out there tempted by this, go and have a visit and see it for yourself. You can say that 'Patrick sent me" - but that won't qualify you for a free mango lassi drink or samosa. Just admire the digital picture.

Adlabs set to become Reliance MediaWorks

2009-09-04T12:22:00.006+01:00

It was announced today that Adlabs Film is changing names and becoming Reliance MediaWorks.

The new moniker makes sense as not only do we not just do ad-films, which is how the name came about 30-odd years ago, but since Manmohan Shetty sold the business to Reliance ADAG we have grown significantly and expanded into many new areas of business. Here is how the Business Standard covered the news:

Adlabs Films, India's leading film and media services company, and a member of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, announched that it proposes to change its name to Reliance MediaWorks Limited, subject to shareholders and other requisite approvals.
For the year ended March 31, 2009, the Company delivered total revenues of Rs. 733 crores ($152 million), reflecting a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 80 per cent in the last three years.

The original name, Adlabs Films, was reflective of the company’s initial business as a film processing laboratory. Pursuant to the Reliance ADA Group acquiring the controlling stake in Adlabs in the year 2005, the company has witnessed transformational growth in the canvas and scale of its operations.

Commenting on the development, Anil Arjun, Chief Executive Officer said, “The name Reliance MediaWorks Limited more accurately reflects our identity as a diversified film and media services company with a global presence.

We are privileged to draw upon the international recognition of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group brand, to further strengthen our leadership position in the media and entertainment business. ”

And I guess we will no longer be confused with Atlabs, though this too has changed name to Deluxe Australia.

No word on a new logo (the one above is the group company logo) but I'm sure I will be getting new business cards before too long. However, not soon enough to take with me to IBC in Amsterdam next week, which I will be attending Friday-Tuesday, followed by the Judge Business School in Cambridge, where on Saturday 19th September I am giving a keynote on 'The Globalisation of Indian Cinema - A Corporate Perspective' and sharing a panel with distinguished guests like Anupam Kher, Parminder Vir and Partho Sen-Gupta, in conjuncture with the Cambridge Film Festival.

India's BIG Cinema embraces opera

2009-06-04T12:36:00.003+01:00

BIG Cinemas is going where no Indian exhibitor has gone before - to screen digital operas. Given the very different musical culture of India this is a more significant undertaking than previous opera screenings in Europe and North America or even Japan. I am happy to have played a small part of it and look forwards to seeing what the outcome will be.

From the Economic Times:

BIG Cinemas, an R-ADAG company, has forged an alliance with London-based More2Screen to bring Italian operas to Indian cinemas. Big has entered into a revenue-sharing arrangement with More2Screen, which will involve screening two operas and a concert. More2Screen specialises in providing alternative content programming like operas, sporting events and concerts to theatres that are digitally equipped.

According to Tushar Dhingra, COO, Big Cinemas, the objective has been to provide distinct content. His company was the first multiplex chain to organise a show of Vagina Monologues in India.

Sadly I will not be around to watch the first one myself as I have to head back for SAWA/Cannes Lions and Cinema Expo, but I have seen them in test screenings and they look and sound fantastic. Ad to it an opera-like venue like the gorgeous BIG Metro cinema and it should be quite the night to remember.

Adlabs ties up with Pathe in first European deal and opens multiplex in Chicago

2009-05-26T07:00:00.004+01:00

Adlabs has become the first Indian movie major to tie up with a major European exhibitor to establish a virtual Bollywood presence in Europe. The deal between Adlabs' BIG Cinemas and Pathé Theatres will give India's largest film distributor and exhibitor an outlet for Bollywood and other Indian films in all major cities in The Netherlands. From the article in Economic Times:

In the Netherlands, the company will roll out three Big Cinemas screens in Pathé Theaters' existing megaplexes in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Hague. "Pathé is a perfect fit in our global strategy to bring Indian movies to Europe and other continents. Starting with the Netherlands, we will explore other countries in Europe," says Anil Arjun, CEO of Adlabs Films.

Pathé Theatres is a part of EuroPalaces movie theatre chain that runs 834 screens in France, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands.

Indian distribution houses prefer Pathé for exhibiting their films to cash in on the 7,00,000 Hindi movie fans of Indian, Pakistani, Afghani, Turkish and Moroccan origin.

Here, Hindi movies like Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, Singh is Kinng, Jodhaa Akbar, Dostana and Om Shanti Om have grossed $130,000-200,000. "We believe that the admissions can be over 400,000 annually. The efforts so far to distribute Indian films can be described as sub-optimal. There are segments the world over where the demand for content is more than the supply, and we believe we can tap into this," adds Mr Arjun.

While the UK constitutes the largest overseas market for Bollywood and other Indian films, the rest of Europe makes up a significant and under-served share. This virtual presence is a further step in the direction of smart and tactic expansion by Adlabs at a time when most other Indian media companies are retreating or re-grouping.

Meanwhile in the US Adlabs is opening its first purpose re-built multiplex with a high-end luxury five-screen multiplex in a wealthy suburb of Chicago. While Adlabs already has more than 170 screens across the US, these were acquired from different cinema operators, while this is the first one refurbished inside-out to BIG Cinema specification. From The Business Standard:

The multiplex, Big Cinemas-Golf Glen, is located in Niles, Chicago. It will have five screens and a premium lounge. The facility will be digitally connected to Adlabs India, enabling the films to be transferred on fibre optic cable within four to six hours instead of using physical films, a statement issued by the company said.

"The Chicago launch is in keeping with our vision to establish a strong foothold for Big Cinemas worldwide in markets with an appetite for Indian cinema," said Anil Arjun, CEO, Adlabs Films.

"Big Cinemas has a significant presence in the US with 170 screens and accounts for 25 per cent of the box office turnover for Hindi Films and over 65 per cent for Tamil and Telugu films released in the US. This multiplex at Niles, Chicago is part of Big Cinema's strategy to actively promote and ensure better reach of Indian movies," he added.

The multiplex will screen a mix of Hollywood, Indian, Polish and Korean films and will have stadium seating to enable live telecasts of cricket matches and other events.

The grand opening will be on 29 May. Wish I was going, but too many other things going on in India right now. I will try to post some photos from the opening party when I get them sent to me.

Adlabs goes after the restoration outsourcing business

2009-05-07T11:30:00.003+01:00

Outsourcing of work might not be popular right now, but it is a fact of business life in the global economy. And few businesses are as ripe for BPO (business process outsourcing) as restoration and image processing. Adlabs/Reliance has recognised this fact and is making a major play for this segment, based on the triple strength of, a) Lowry Digital's reputaiton and relations in Hollywood, coupled with, 2) a global fibre optic network, and now also, 3) a mega-size operation in India for handling enormous amounts of content.

From the press release:

Adlabs Films Limited, a member of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group today announced their establishing a BPO business for the media space.

Adlabs Films’ BPO will be one of the world’s largest comprehensive digital restoration and content processing services facilities. Spread over 90,000 sq ft, it will employ 1200 employees within a year and will comply with MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America) standards.

The BPO is aimed at providing a comprehensive one point solution for the transition from Analog to Digital and Physical Media to Digital Data.

The BPO has already commenced business with 300 employees and has recently obtained a prestigious order for digitization and digital restoration of 1000 films preserved by the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), Pune, a media unit of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India.

This operation will cover much more than just restoration:

The services of the BPO include: Restoration, Encoding, Transcoding, Compression Authoring, Format & Standards Conversion, Duplication & Dubs, Meta tagging, Repurposing/Versioning, QC & Broadcast Logistics and Archiving.

My boss was interviewed by The Hindu and gave some more details:

Anil Ambani-promoted Adlabs Films on Thursday said it is looking at tapping the USD 400-million market for digital content restoration through its new media BPO venture and is planning to foray into North America and Europe among others.
"With new platforms like mobiles, online and HD, the demand for content restoration has picked up... Major portion of the demand is coming from North America, Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia," Adlabs Films Chief Executive Officer Anil Arjun told PTI.
The 300-employee BPO division, which became operational four months ago and will add another 900 employees this year, is looking at major opportunities in North America and Europe.

I am thrilled on a personal level, partly because it is the company I work for, but also because I feel passionately about archiving and restoration and have been ever since I first read The Parade's Gone By.

There are tens of thousands of films slowly fading or corroding in archives around the world and for every restored "Gone With The Wind" or "Casablanca" there are tens of thousands of obscure titles that are just as much an important part of our audiovisual history that desperately need to be saved for future generations. Thanks to operations like this the cost of restoring films will go down and more will be saved.

Adlabs sends Bollywood films to US via submarine cable

2009-04-21T12:23:00.005+01:00

The announcement has finally been made and I can at last talk openly about something very exciting that we have been doing for the past four months. As of Christmas last year Adlabs has started its Indian film releases to its US cinemas using the submarine fibre optic cable owned and operated by our sister company Reliance Globalcom. The press release is out:

Reliance Globalcom’s privately owned global fiber-optic network has enabled Adlabs to move its content more efficiently, dramatically reducing delivery times by 50-90 percent while securing the encrypted content during the transport process. Adlabs found the dedicated optical-fiber communication (OFC) network to be a superior transport method, as it exceeds the film industry’s requirements for speed, security and reliability.

“Reliance Globalcom’s global network acts as an international digital artery that allows Adlabs to offer content and media services globally,” said Anil Arjun, CEO, Adlabs Films. “With Reliance Globalcom’s extensive fiber assets, multi-metro connectivity and service assurance, we have the agility to serve the industry by moving film and media assets quickly and securely anywhere in the world. This means more movies and HD content like broadcasts of national sporting events and ceremonies can reach the big screen faster, more efficiently and in more locations around the world.”

Adlabs has successfully distributed many films over Reliance Globalcom’s fiber network, including the latest Indian hits such as Ghajini, Luck by Chance and Delhi 6. The films were all mastered in the DCI-approved 2K format in Mumbai by Adlabs Digital Cinema, sent over OFC to New York and screened in Adlabs’ BIG Cinemas digital cinemas in New Jersey and California. In comparison to the industry’s traditional method for delivering digitized films (i.e., physical shipments via a courier system), Adlabs preferred Reliance Globalcom’s global infrastructure for various key benefits.

What the press release doesn't say is that Ghajini was set to open on 23rd December (never an easy date), and not having done this sort of thing before, we sent a hard drive back up to be on the safe side three days before the film's opening. Despite there being a direct flight Mumbai-New York, the courier company (which shall remian nameless) sent the drive Mumbai-Frankfurt-London-Chicago-Newark, where it arrived December 28th, i.e. five days after the film had opened. After that we never looked back. Optical fibre connectivity (OFC) was the only way ahead.

Variety did a good write up of this announcement:

Anil Arjun, CEO of Adlabs Films, told Daily Variety that costs "are competitive with shipping (hard disks). But shipping has hidden costs, because there are time delay costs, there are delays in customs."
More than one option
(Co) Daily Variety
Filmography, Year, Role
(Co) Daily Variety
Adlabs also plans to bring movies and alternative content from India and other foreign-language territories to niche auds in Reliance's American theaters. Adlabs' Big chain owns 21 theaters with 166 screens in the U.S., targeted at areas with large immigrant communities. The entire chain should be converted to digital production within 18 months.
Adlabs has already used the Reliance Globalcom network to send recent Indian pics "Ghajini," "Luck by Chance" and "Delhi 6" to screens in New Jersey and California.

To date we have done about ten titles and we would have done plenty more, if it had not been for the current dispute betwene Indian distributors and multiplex operators that is blocking any new releases.

Next we are looking to expand this to other parts of the world. Reliance Globalcom covers a ring around the world with its OFC network, so Bollywood will soon be coming to a cinema near you via a secure deep sea cable.

The short shelf-life of Bollywood actresses

2009-02-24T13:51:00.003Z

Jai Ho! Slumdog is top dog at the Oscars. I'm very happy that the film did as well as it did and congratulations to everyone involved - including Adlabs' small contribution. So much has been written about it in Indian media, however, that there is nothing new or original that I can tell you about it - though ask me when you meet me what Danny Boyle told me when I met him at Mumbai airport, prior to the film's shoot, was the worst aspect about making a film in Mumbai. These days he is either to effusive or polite to discuss the one horror. And, no, it's not the stench of the slums.

An article that may have escaped your attention was an opinion piece by Praveen Dass in Times of India (One for the times) that tracks the antecedents of the film extremely well and in the process dispels some of the myths and caricatures about the film:

So, is Slumdog superfluous? Is it guilty of caricature? In parts, perhaps, but not in sum. Besides, soft burlesque, as many parts of Slumdog surely are, is not without its uses. Indeed, three outlandish sequences in Slumdog should point us to its real nature as fabulist melodrama. One is the moment when Jamal, the plucky protagonist, cheerfully plunges into a pool of shit to get an autograph. Another is the surreal image of a child dolled up as a blue Rama in the middle of a riot. And, finally, the dance sequence at the end is the film-makers' paying back their Bollywood debt. All point to Slumdog's true nature as an over-the-top modern fable, best consumed with a pinch of masala. In fact, the film's premise should give that away. Surely randomness and chance never get this good in life, real or reel. Boyle has tried this formula before with his underappreciated Millions. Second time was better. And maybe it needed India.

It is worth reading the whole article. Not least, it made me think that Scotland should have rebelled against how the wannabe independent part of the UK was portrayed in Trainspotting (heroin use, filthy toilets, random pub violence), had they been as easily offended or prone to manufacture controversies as some of Slumdog's critics - admittedly a very small minority in these post-Oscar days.

While honest self criticism of India is admirably widespread, the same cannot often be said about the Hindi film industry (aka 'Bollywood'), which is why I was all the more fascinated to come across an article this past weekend about how the industry's leading ladies are finding themselves having shorter and shorter careers on the silver screen with each 'generation' (actually 'season' by now).

The article is called 'Tick Tick Three Your Time is Up' by Indu Mirani. The article is far from preachy but asks some penetrating questions:

So, why is it that heroes can play the lead role for decades while the girls have a shelf life of just four to five years? Earlier, before the multiplex generation came along and changed the way we perceived filmmaking, there was the notion that the minute a heroine entered her 30s or got married, whichever was sooner, she lost her allure. “Women were to be fantasised about” was the explanation and the only way she fitted the traditional Indian (Bombay to Bihar) fantasy was if she was seen to be young, curvaceous and virginal, with particular emphasis on the last virtue. And so any girl who wanted to last longer made sure she was all this.

This often lead to the ridiculous situation where a girl who had debuted at say 18 suddenly claimed that she made her first film at 15, which soon became 12. That that kept her poised at 26 for many years was the idea and in most cases it succeeded.

To keep the virginal image intact was slightly tougher but they managed that too by making statements like “I’ve never been on a date,” or “Love? Never felt it. I’m dying to fall in love.” Sridevi, it is rumoured, was so unaware of things that when she got pregnant and felt the first stirrings of the child she thought she had gas.

This sadly means that Freida Pinto, the female star of Slumdog, cannot look forward to a long career in Bollywood, should she get a break there thanks to the film (far from given). Her best hope is to keep straddling both worlds - these days Aishwarya Rai features largest in the poster for Pink Panther 2.

Button or Slumdog at the Oscars - tough choice

2009-01-31T08:11:00.004Z

I am split in my loyalties ahead of the Academy Awards. While I want 'Slumdog Millionaire' to do well for obvious reasons, I am equally happy if 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' walks away with an armful of statuettes, as this was a major project for our sister company Lowry Digital.

Film & Video has a very fact filled Q&A with Alan Silvers that is pre-faced thus:

Lowry Digital is well-known among videophiles as a company that enables cutting-edge digital restorations of significant films for DVD and Blu-ray — modulating grain, repairing damage, and returning important titles to show-print status. But as more and more production moves into the digital realm, Lowry is flexing new muscles. Lowry has worked on 3D features like Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, where fine image-matching between the left-eye and right-eye pictures becomes crucial to a comfortable viewing experience — Lowry Digital Director of Business Development Alan Silvers notes that founder John Lowry is nurturing a venture, Trioscopics, dedicated to improving digital 3D. But Silvers believes what's known as "the Lowry process" has applications in the traditional feature-film workflow, especially as directors work to incorporate multiple shooting formats into a single, nuanced vision. One of Lowry's most recent projects, director David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, has just been nominated for 13 Academy Awards — including, crucially, a nod for Claudio Miranda's work as cinematographer.

So while I liked Anthony Dod Mantle's camerawork in Slumdog, my vote would go to Claudio Miranda - not least because we've been getting complaints from members of the audience here in our cinemas in Mumbai, objecting to the digital cinema projection because the image is (they say) dark, grainy and pixilated, not realizing that it is not the projection - which was checked by STAR-Fox staff ahead of the films gala screening, that we arranged in digital - but the artistic intention of the filmmakers.

And just so you don't think either I or Lowry have anything against our good friends at 20th Century Fox - Lowry just completed some stellar work on The Robe as well.

Adlabs/BIG pioneers digital cinema subtitles for Bollywood films

2008-12-26T08:41:00.004Z

One of the great things about working with Adlabs/Reliance ADAG is that the company is always open, nay, hungry, for new ideas. So when we came to BIG Cinemas with the proposal that we could screen Hindi films that we had mastered with English subtitles, they immediately saw the potential in terms of widening access to new audiences.

From Indiantelevision.com:

In a bid to attract the hearing-impaired and non-Hindi speaking audience to its theaters pan India, Reliance ADAG’s theatre chain Big Cinemas is planning to screen the forthcoming movies with English subtitles.

To begin with, Big Cinemas will screen the Amir Khan-starrer Ghajini with English subtitles from its second week at digital screens in BIG Cinemas’ Wadala and Metro BIG Cinemas in Mumbai.

“We wanted to expand our audience reach and hence, decided to take up this new initiative. This will ensure that the cinema medium can be enjoyed by a larger number of the public - especially the hearing impaired who could not earlier understand the dialogues,” says Big Cinemas COO Tushar Dhingra.

"The release of Ghajini, being an eagerly awaited film, was an ideal way for us to start offering this facility and will set a trend for future releases,” Dhingra adds.

If this works out the hope is that all the major Hindi-language films released will have special screenings to benefit 'goras' like myself and non-Hindi speaking Indians, as well as hearing impaired.

Adlabs has been subtitling prints that get sent overseas (Ghajini went to no less than 23 countries, including unlikely locations like Norway and New Zealand, on 300+ prints) for many years and we have done some tests in the past, but now this will be an integral part of the Adlabs Digitla Cinema service offering.

Bollywood and Terrorists - File Under: 'In Questionable Taste' (and hope it never sees the light of day)

2008-12-18T11:43:00.003Z

First there was Bollywood. Then came the terrorists. Then the Chief Minister of the state of Maharastra was forced to resign, partly because he provided a personal 'terror tourism' tour to famed Bollywood director Ram Gopal Verma. While RGV may not be planning any film on the terror attacks (yet), this incident did not put off others, far less scrupulous.

From the Irish Times:

It has emerged that Bollywood film-makers have been queuing up to register film titles based on last month’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, prompting suggestions of insensitivity and bad taste.

According to the Indian Motion Pictures Producers’ Association in India’s film capital, Mumbai, at least 18 titles associated with the November 26th attacks, in which the city’s Taj Mahal and Oberoi Trident hotels and a nearby Jewish centre were besieged by gunmen, have been registered so far.

These include: 26/11 Mumbai Under Terror; Operation Five-star Mumbai; Taj to Oberoi; 48 Hours at the Taj and Black Tornado.

According to Ujwala Londhe of the producers’ association, the first title was registered as early as November 28th, a day before the siege was lifted following firefights between national security guard commandos and the gunmen.

While there is of course a chance that one of these films, sorry, titles, may turn out to be as good as United 93, I highly doubt that the time is right yet for Bollywood to tackle recent events. This despite some very good pre-attack films that dealt with terrorism, such as A Wednesday and Mumbai Meri Jaan.

Mumbai terrorist attacks hurt box office

2008-12-08T06:34:00.006Z

Perhaps not surprisingly, people getting shot and killed at the doorstep of cinemas (Metro BIG, to be precise) has had a dampening affect. I went and saw two films this past weekend, one older Bollywood release and one newer Hollywood, and both were playing in prime multiplexes to only about 20 per cent audiences. Not good.

These observations are backed up by the newspapers that surveys several cinema operators about people's refusals to go out for some out-of-home escapism. From the Times of India (Film theatres await fans' return):

A disappointed Manoj Desai, of G-7 multiplex, Bandra, said, "Nobody is going to cinema halls. The business is so bad that it is going to be difficult for businesses to recover the cost of air-conditioning a cinema hall. People are scared and don't want to venture out.''

The four films released on Friday were `Meerabai Not Out', `Maharathi', `O My God' and `Dil Kabbadi'. The paid previews and premieres for the releases were cancelled.

As they were medium-budget films, the real impact to the industry will be gauged only later this month, when bigger-budget films starring Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan are slated for release.

A vice-president of Cinemax Cinemas said, "We expect a weak period after 26/11.'' He hopefully added that business was also usually slow before a "King Khan coming''. "People are waiting for a major banner to go for a movie,'' he said.

So all eyes (and hopes) are pinned to YRF's big release this Friday Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, followed by Studio 18's and Warner Bros. India's Chandni Chowk to China, two and four weeks later respectively (not to mention big Hollywood releases like STAR-Fox's The Day The Earth Stood Still).

It is not just cinemas but restaurants that are also suffering, with another article informing us that 'Post-terror, eateries lose 35% business', again not surprising given what happened at Leopold Cafe. I didn't go to any five star hotel this week, but I'm sure that they were emptier for Sunday brunches than usual. Not that we are all afraid of terrorists striking at any moment, but there's just not the mood.

At least I did my bit for the cinemas this weekend, but more is needed. Let's make it the patriotic duty of all Indians to go to the cinema this coming weekend. I will be leading from the front - of the line at the box office.

(Photo credit: Maciej Dakowicz)

Update from Mumbai and Bollywood

2008-12-03T07:08:00.003Z

Mumbai has been too much in the news for a rather unhappy reason lately. Fortunately our colleagues at Adlabs, as well as friends and families are unhurt, but killings were going on right outside our Metro BIG cinema and dozens of foreigners and Indians were killer and injured. The terror attacks have hit the box office, though hopefully people will find their way back to the cinemas to dream themselves away for a few hours.

This and other things mean that I will sadly have to give CineAsia a miss this year, which is a particular shame given that BIG Cinemas is honoured as International Exhibitor of the Year. But there is plenty of updates from Film Journal International on the film and cinema industry in India. Nyay Bhushan reports on how Bollywood billions: Indian distribution and production change with the times, while Kevin Lally report on how D vs. E: E-Cinema keeps foothold in India as 2K digital grows. Both articles are well worth reading.

Thank you, lastly, to all the friends and colleagues who have contacted me to make sure that we are all OK. Your kind thoughts and well wishes were much appreciated. These are unhappy times, but they do not weaken our resolve to stay on and make digital cinema happen in India.

What I did in New Zealand, Or, Why Peter Jackson has the grooviest post-production outfit in the whole world

2008-11-22T05:27:00.003Z

I spent several productive and interesting day in Wellington, New Zealand as a speaker and guest of AnimfxNZ. Having been to many conferences it is easy to get jaded about these things, but the sheer brainpower of the assembled crowd (from afar and local) made it exceptional.

Carolyn Giardina was there and in addition to moderating the opening panel that set the tone for the two day conference she found time to do an excellent write up in THR.com. Read the whole article. Here is just the opening:

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- Underscoring the growing global interest in 3-D, both for theatrical release and in the home, 3Ality Digital CEO Steve Schklair told attendees at the 3rd annual AnimfxNZ Symposium held at the Wellington Convention Center how his company recently lensed an episode of NBC's "Chuck" in the 3-D format.

3Ality Digital -- the company behind the musical documentary film "U2 3D" -- handled the special episode of the spy comedy series, set to air Feb. 2, the Monday following the Super Bowl. Plans to distribute glasses to consumers are under way.

The exec offered his perspective on the prospects of 3-D in the home. "The good new is there are at least two million 'stereo-ready' sets in the U.S. market waiting for stereo content," he said. "The bad news is the market has moved away from rear projection TVs, so that will eventually go away."

But he added that new options for 3-D TV are on the way. "The home market is moving forward because there is starting to be content in the market."

In addition to the two-day conference we got a tour of Wellington and visited Peter Jackson's Weta and Park Road Post. As Guillermo Del Toro said, "This is Hollywood - the way God intended it to be." I could not agree more. There was also networking with all the great speakers, touring of the charming city of Wellington (Aberdeen crossed with San Francisco) and sampling of New Zealand wine and food. A big thanks to Kim Lavery who did such a great job of organizing it and all the people who helped out. Next year I will volunteer to go there just to run around and hold the microphone. It. Was. That. Good.

The President is coming...in 2K digital

2008-11-20T15:24:00.001Z

One of the many exciting things about working in India is the chance to get to be part of many 'firsts' and to work with people who are passionate about driving change. One of these people is Rohan Sippy - of the legendary Bollywood Sippy family - who is behind India's first end-to-end feature release: shot on the Viper, released exclusively in 2K and in-between that - yes, you guessed it - mastered and encoded by Adlabs Digital Cinema.

The mockumentary 'The President Is Coming' is releasing next week and we are privileged to have worked with what is not only a first-of-its-kind films, but what also looks like a very funny comedy (judging by the trailer). From Entertainment One India:

The future of Indian cinema is finally here. In a futuristic move, Ramesh Sippy Entertainment (RSE) has decided to release their forthcoming movie The President is Coming, exclusively on the 2K Digital Platform.

This means that no celluloid prints of this film will be distributed in Mumbai and will result in substantial savings on cost of release. The film will have prime show timings in all the screens and there will be no shuttling of prints. RSE is under contract with Scrabble Entertainment to use their wide Digital platform of 2K Digital Screens throughout India. Patrons will experience 2K Digital Image Quality which is the best in the world today.

The President is Coming is an English film and the first ever 'Mockumentary' about new India. It is a comedy about young India's ambitions and aspirations. With a style that is very tongue in cheek, the film takes a look at President George Bush' visit to India in 2006 where he wanted to shake hands with one young Indian under the age of 30.

Find out more about the movie itself from the MySpace page. I look forward to seeing it, not least because it is in English, and I hope you all get a chance to see it too. Maybe even in 2K.

Adlab's BIG Cinemas is Exhibitor of the Year at CineAsia 2008

2008-11-05T06:26:00.003Z

No sooner had Adlabs' exhibition arm been re-branded BIG Cinemas then the news broke that it will be crowned Exhibitor of the Year at this year's CineAsia held in Macau on 9-11 December. We are thrilled on behalf of our colleagues at BIG Cinema who have worked tirelessly to not just make it India's largest cinema chain, but now also one of the most honoured. From THR.com:

Sunshine said that the 2008 edition at the Wynn Hotel and the Macau Tower, set for Dec. 9-11, will feature an advance 3-D screening of the Disney animated comedy "Bolt." The confab's Exhibitor of the Year award will go to Tusha Dhingra, the head of India's Big Cinemas, formerly known as Adlabs.

This comes not long after the cinema chain was named Retailer of the Year award and Best Retailer in Entertainment before that. But this definitely tops both of those achievements. I would like to think that being a digital cinema pioneer in India had a small part to play in the decision underpinning this award.

The global economy may be down but India just had a weekend box office bonanza with the twin hits Golmal Returns and Fashion both playing to full houses. This coming weekend Quantum of Solace will open here (a week before the US, no less) on the largest print release ever for a Hollywood film in India - 600 prints, beating Sony's previous record for Spider-Man 3 (597 prints), with Casino Royal (427 prints) in third place rounding off SPE's hat trick.

The coming weeks will see releases that were pushed back from their original Diwali release slots, so it should be a very happy Q4 for BIG Cinemas and other Indian exhibitors.

In praise of Bond - and Lowry Digital

2008-10-21T10:02:00.005+01:00

I have not bothered to update you about the ins-and-outs of the Ambani-Speielberg-DreamWorks-Paramount deal because there is enough written about it everywhere else anyway. Instead I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight the good work done by our colleagues as Lowry Digital ahead of the latest James Bond release. "Quantum-what," are you saying? No, no, this is Blu-Ray release of the Bond film that launched the franchise, Dr. No.

Lowry Digital did the restoration of the Bond series four years ago and amazingly it is the same restoration that is being used for the BD release as was used for the DVD. The release was reviewed by Robert Harris, one of the hardest task masters when it comes to digital restoration (a much abused term if there ever was one) and rightly so, as he was in charge of the restoration of Lawrence of Arabia and Vertigo.

So when you submit a four year old restoration meant for DVD, it is a bit like submittng a freshman essay as your PhD thesis to the toughest professor in college. What does Mr Harris have to say on "A few words about...™ Dr. No - in Blu-ray":

M-G-M and Eon made a prudent move in permitting Lowry Digital to scan, digitize, and work their magic on the elements. A featurette produced several years ago describes the work performed as restoration, and while I'm not certain whether the actual work performed was restoration or digital cleanup, the final result on Blu-ray is nothing less than spectacular.
...
The correct post facility, using the correct (here Lowry's proprietary) techniques, can make a huge difference in the viewing pleasure of films from the last half of the twentieth century.
...
Dr. No, via the wizards at Lowry Digital, looks far better than it has any right to look. The overall viewing experience is superb. The disc arrives at a street price with a full list of extras of around $23.

The question that I raised earlier, as to whether this film is truly "restored" in the full sense of the word really doesn't come into play here. The single overriding fact is that the Blu-ray is as perfect as it can be.

High praise indeed from a man who really knows his trade and who has slammed many a lesser efforts of 'digital restoration'. Big congratulations to John and his team and I am looking forwards to getting my hands on a copy to see it for myself.

Adabs/Reliance - first to distribute films by fiber optic cable commercially

2008-09-24T15:52:00.006+01:00

Distribution of digital cinema films to multiplexes by fibre optic cable has long been the (pipe) dream of the movie industry. Qwest and Fox tested it in 2000. Japan's NTT West tested it in 4K with WB, Paramount and Sony in 005-2006. But as of May this year, Adlabs together with Reliance Communication are doing it on a weekly commercial basis - week in, week out. From Indiantelevision.com:

Adlabs Digital Cinema adds that it has also established a world first by becoming the first and only operator in the world to-date to commercially distribute digital cinema films over the optic fiber cable (OFC). Using the network of Reliance Communications, over 2000 digital cinema shows to-date have come from digital copies delivered via OFC on a weekly commercial basis.

Films are encoded at Adlabs Digital Cinema Mastering Facility at Film City in Mumbai and sent over a 200Mbps connection to its Content Distribution and Logistics (CDL) Hub at Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City (DAKC) in Navi Mumbai, from where they are sent further via dedicated 100Mbps OFC to cinemas as far as Ahmedabad. OFC allows for transportation of digital cinema films that is faster, more reliable and more secure than any other form of delivery.

With Reliance Communication having laid down 80,000 kilometers of fiber all across India, we could not have asked for a better partner (and it helps having the same parent company in Reliance ADAG), though the 'last mile' to the multiplex we've had to install.

So forget hard drives or satellite. If you want to see the future of film distribution, book a ticket to Mumbai and come and visit us. We will treat you to a nice meal as well.

UPDATE: This news was covered by both Variety and THR.com.

Spielberg-Reliance deal signed - Paramount reaction is very gracefull

2008-09-20T06:54:00.003+01:00

So at last the deal has been signed. Spielberg is officially exiting Paramount and setting up DreamWorks SKG as an independent entity with the backing of Anil Ambani's Reliance ADA Group. THR.com broke the news:

Steven Spielberg has finalized a deal to secure at least $500 million in funding from Mumbai-based Reliance Big Entertainment.

In a related transaction, JPMorgan Securities will lead a bank loan syndication giving Spielberg another $500 million or more for a total $1 billion-plus to re-create DreamWorks as a private company, allowing it to sever its current ties with Paramount. Documents were finalized Friday after representatives of the various parties reached a handshake agreement on deal terms Thursday night.

The pleasant surprise was how gracious Paramount was about Spielberg's exit:

In a surprise move, Paramount issued a statement saying that the departing DreamWorks principals were also free to take their employees with them. While the DreamWorks brass had exit clauses in their current contracts, they needed permission to bring other execs or staff along to a reconstituted DreamWorks.

"To facilitate a timely and smooth transition, Paramount has waived certain provisions from the original deal to clear the way for the DreamWorks principals and their employees to join their new company without delay," the studio said.

Spielberg, DreamWorks partner David Geffen and CEO Stacey Snider are expected to quickly tender their resignations from Paramount. A DreamWorks spokesman declined comment on the developments.

Paramount even issued a letter wishing the exiting team well. The studio has had time to prepare for this departure and plan its reaction. It may also be angling for a future distribution pact with the new DreamWorks. But I would like to believe that the good people at Paramount are sincere. However, others are already busy wooing Spielberg to distribute through them:

Next comes a distribution deal, which is why GE's Jeffrey Immelt and Universal's Ron Meyer were dining with Spielberg and Snider last Thursday and why NBC Universal boss Jeff Zucker spent the better part of that afternoon with Steven planning out the rebuild of the fire-ravaged Uni backlot. Given how Spielberg sees Universal as his professional home (he never moved his offices even after Paramount bought DreamWorks), I've always assumed he'd land there. Now, with Immelt and Zucker paying homage, it looks like another done deal no matter how much Geffen would dearly love to play one studio off of the other and mastermind a bidding war for Spielberg/Snider. And David himself? He keeps telling everyone that all he wants is to say goodbye to the movie biz.

The effectively reveres acquisition of DremWorks in 2005 - which infused new talent and vigor into the seemingly moribund Paramount - was what the studio needed and it is under Brad Gray's leadership much stronger as a result today. So much so that they can afford to see Spielberg leave.

Now the interesting thing will be to see what the Reliance and JP Morgan-backed DreamWorks does. Just don't expect Spielberg to start shooting a masala film with SRK next.

Adlabs awarded FACT's anti-piracy certification

2008-09-09T05:07:00.008+01:00

I am very chuffed to announce that Adlabs has been awarded certification by UK's Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT). This makes us not just the only film services company in India receive this recognition, but the the first one in all of Asia. This demonstrates our absolute seriousness about protecting our clients films and that we do not benchmark ourselves against India but against the best in the world. The certificate was only awarded after a rigorous on-site two day inspection, audit and a series of interviews by a FACT officer who flew in from London especially for this purpose.

Bollywood or Hollywood, the same high standards of security and quality are what I push for in digital cinema and my colleagues at Adlabs insist on for DI and for the print lab. From The Hollywood Reporter:

NEW DELHI -- Adlabs Films, India's largest film processing facility, said Monday that it is the first such facility in Asia to be certified by U.K.-based industry body Federation Against Copyright Theft.

A large number of film service companies in the U.K. and Europe are now accredited by FACT, making it easier for studios and filmmakers to know they are dealing with a secure facility.

The Adlabs deal marks the first time in FACT's 25-year history that a company has been accredited outside the U.K. or Europe.

The certification applies to Adlabs' film processing and print lab, digital lab and digital cinema mastering facility along with Adlabs' preview theater, all housed within its Film City premises in Mumbai.

More details on the international implicatins of this deal from Indiantelevision.com:

Adlabs Films, the entertainment arm of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, is stepping up to tap the international film processing markets, specifically the US, UK and Europe.

Already one of the biggest end-to-end digital post-production services provider in India, Adlabs feels there is potential to have a strong outsourcing model for Hollywood studios due to a low-cost advantage.

As a first step towards achieving this ambition, Adlabs has got "International Anti-Piracy Certification" by the UK body - FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft). With the accreditation in place, Adlabs is hopeful of getting the foreign projects outsourced to its Film City premises in Mumbai.

"In the US, UK and other European countries, studios do not outsource processing because of piracy. Now after getting a certificate from an international body like FACT, studios and film-makers will know that they are dealing with a secure facility and we will be able to market ourselves better," Adlabs motion picture processing and allied services president Shankar Dutta tells Indiantelevision.com.

Already one Hollywood studio is doing its release prints in India with us and we are in discussions with others for print, DI and digital cinema work. You can now find us under the list of accredited members (screen shot above from sub-section of accredited digital cinema members).

And as the press release says, this is not the end but the tart of our efforts to ensure and demonstrate our commitment to copyright protection. Watch this space for more developments and announcements in the future.

Middle East woes Hollywood with financing

2008-09-04T06:19:00.005+01:00

Now the petro-dollars are flowing back to the US, with Middle Eastern states taking an interest in Hollywood. It seems like $1bn is the minimum starting sum these days. The government owned Abu Dhabi Media (ADM) will spend that amount on making movies and theme parks in partnership with the likes of Warner Bros. From THR.com:

ADM unit Imagenation Abu Dhabi aims to partner on international film projects and invest in regional talent to create Arabic- and mixed-language content with crossover appeal.

The deal adds to ADM's growing global portfolio, which includes a previously announced film and video deal with Warner Bros. as well as plans for theme park and movie theater projects. ADM's first film under its Warner deal -- the Robert Rodriguez-helmed "Shorts" -- recently went into postproduction.

Based in the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi, Imagenation will assume oversight of the Warners deal, launched last year with twin $500 million funds covering film and video productions. The latest ADM funding is expected to cover 40 projects toting budgets of up to $50 million.

I am now waiting for one of the two US presidential candidates to take a swipe at Hollywood's dependence of foreign oil financing for its all-American entertainment.

Meanwhile the wait for the announcement about the signing of the Ambani-Spielberg/Reliance ADAG-DreamWorks deal continues. It is imminent, I am reliably told.

Who lost Spielberg, UTV cracks US Top 20 and Snoop goes Bollywood

2008-07-30T11:09:00.003+01:00

An assortment of news with an Indian flavour in the last few days.

It is talked about as if the ink is dry on the paper, but this article from the New York Times gives a bit more context to the Ambani-Spielberg/Reliance-Dreamworks deal under negotiation, particularly the financial climate in which an Indian conglomerate trumped Hollywood studios and traditional investment banks to the world's most commercially successful director:

But there was still an element of shock [following the announcement of the Reliance negotiations]: Hollywood could not come up with a rich enough deal for Mr. Spielberg, the most bankable director in the business and a “national treasure”? His last movie alone, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” has sold $743 million in tickets and is still playing in theaters around the world.
For that matter, there wasn’t anybody on Wall Street willing to write a blank check for the guy with “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park” on his résumé?
The pending deal with Reliance underscores some realities about Mr. Spielberg — mainly that he has become so expensive that few public companies can afford him. Mr. Spielberg’s standard deal, on par with other blue-chip talent, is 20 percent of a movie’s gross from the first ticket sold, although he agreed to a somewhat less aggressive paycheck on the latest “Indiana Jones” installment to offset its high budget.

And:

Hollywood’s seeming inability to close a deal with Mr. Spielberg highlights the shift toward a more corporate, buttoned-down movie business. Just a few years ago, bragging rights often drove business decisions. Steven Spielberg is available? Back up the money truck. We want that jewel in our crown no matter what the cost. And studio bosses could justify such ego-driven loss leaders: In the entertainment business, talent draws talent.

And:

As for Wall Street, the firm belief in Hollywood is that the arrival of Reliance marks the end of the private equity and hedge fund boom that has propped up the industry. With the capital markets in turmoil, terms have tightened substantially for movie deals. Investors are demanding faster payback schedules, better guarantees and even a say in how movies are made and marketed.

So out with the Germans and in with the Indians, confirming once again that Hollywood is colour blind when it comes to foreign investment, as long as it is dollar-green.

Elsewhere follow Indian company UTV has just cracked the Top 20 US distributors list on the strength of several Bollywood hits. From THR.com:

UTV Motion Pictures said Monday that it earned $5.48 million from ticket sales in North America in the first half of the year, becoming the first foreign-language distributor to rise into the ranks of the top 20 distributors in the territory. North America's growing South Asian population flocked to see such UTV releases as the historical epic "Jodhaa Akbar," which earned $3.44 million in ticket sales; action-thriller "Race," which earned $1.37 million; and recent musical release "Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na," which has earned $539,857 so far.

Not bad, but I am sure that the likes of UTV and Eros can and will climb even higher than this, possibly all the way up to the Top 10.

An unlikely convert to all things Bollywood is bad dog rapper Snoop Doggy Dog. But soon he will be seen duetting on the big screen with Bollywood's comedy star du jour Akshay Kumar. Sayz the Snoopster himself in IHT.com:

"I really dig how much music is infused with the movies" in Bollywood, Snoop Dogg said in an e-mailed response to questions. "Lots of hip-hop tracks sample Indian music, and a lot of their music sounds like it was influenced by hip-hop," he said. "We're putting together something real big" in India, that will include collaborations, live shows and "more movies with some of my Bollywood homies."
"I'm coming to take over Bollywood," Snoop Dogg promised during the video shoot. "I've never been able to come over there and do shows for you all, but now I'm going to come and do shows," he said in a clip that the video's promoters put on YouTube. "This is just the beginning."

I for one can't wait.

Getting digital wrong in Mumbai from a distance

2008-07-16T08:49:00.006+01:00

Never let facts get in the way of a good story, or better, of a daring piece of analysis. That is the only conclusion I can draw from the following breathless pronouncement by my colleague Nick Dagger over at Digital Cinema Report:

July 15, 2008 | Issue #131
A recent press release from Digital Projection International highlighted the news that the company is supplying the projectors for all of the 1,000 digital screens in UFO Moviez’s digital cinema network in Mumbai, India. While that is admittedly a significant announcement for DPI, I think it represents an even more significant development for the global digital cinema marketplace. My reasoning? The projectors are all 720P HD, which means that – for now, and by choice – the largest digital theatre chain in the largest city in the world will not be showing first run Hollywood movies digitally.

Interesting if it was true, but it is not. Simple research would have thrown up two glaring errors in this claim. The first is that Mumbai is the largest city on earth. It is not. From Wikipedia:

It is not the biggest, it just feels like the most crowded.

Secondly, there are not 1,000 UFO screens using DPI projectors in Mumbai. There aren't even 1,000 digital screens by any and all operators combined. In fact, there aren't 1,000 cinema screens in Mumbai full stop.

A quick visit to UFO Moviez's website would have confirmed it, as they helpfully provide a list of all their screens everywhere in India by state:

According to this list Maharastra (the state in which Mumbai is located) had a total of 257 screens installed. Of these I counted 46 screens in Mumbai (if we include Navi Mumbai). So well short of the 1,000 claimed.

You do not need to live in Mumbai to know this - an Internet connection and a healthy dose of skepticism about outlandish digital claims is all that is required. But he is right that UFO will not be showing Hollywood films on the e-cinema screens. However, a little bird tells me that they have a surprise in store.

Bollywood's BO takings slump in 1st half of 2008

2008-07-08T13:57:00.003+01:00

Half way through the box office year in Bollywood the industry is feeling distinctly glum at the lack of a significant number of hits so far. Just three to four films have genuinely done gang buster business, if THR.com is the be believed:

Bollywood lost about $37.5 million in the first half of 2008, as most films released here sold fewer tickets than expected, a leading business daily reported here Monday.

A survey published by the Economic Times of India also showed ticket receipts of only $75 million for the 47 Hindi-language films released from January through June, well below industry expectations.

Bollywood, the most famous segment of India's vast movie industry, does not have an independent source for boxoffice data.

"It's been a bad year (in that) major films have just tanked," film critic and industry analyst Rajeev Masand told The Hollywood Reporter.

The few successes in the first half of the year included UTV's historical epic "Jodhaa Akbar," which collected $30 million worldwide on the way to recovering its $10 million budget; the action-packed "Race" from the Abbas-Mastan directing duo; and "Jannat" (Heaven), Kunal Deshmukh's look at illegal betting in cricket.

The second half of the year got off to a so-so start, with the Aamir Khan Productions/PVR film Jaane Tu... doing well, while the Adlabs-backed Love Story 2050 did less well.

Unlike Hollywood, which has a box office summer stretching from May until Labour Day, the Indian box office summer is usually in May before the monsoon, though the IPL cricket stole away the viewers this year and will have a dampening effect next year. Hopes are instead high for Diwali and the releases tied to the other Indian national and religious holidays.

Despite this the investment in Indian films continues to grow, Hollywood studios are stepping up their local productions, more and more multiplexes are being opened and the expectations are for the industry as a whole to continue growing.

Interestingly websites that host pirated Bollywood content that is downloaded by NRIs (non-resident Indians) in UK, US and even Finland (!) are doing terrific business according to this article. For Bollywood, digital cinema and legit digital overseas distribution cannot come soon enough to help fill the coffers.

Reliance-Spielberg discussions "going well"

2008-07-03T15:29:00.004+01:00

I have just returned to Mumbai - which is looking particularly lush and green after several weeks of rain - now that I have secured a permanent work visa. Lots of things have been going on while I attended SAWA and Cinema Expo, but over in the States the discussions to enable Spielberg to set up DreamWorks as a stand-alone studio with Reliance ADAG's support are apparently going well. From THR.com, which leads both the international and domestic daily with the news:

Representatives of Steven Spielberg and the Indian conglomerate Reliance continue to talk daily about terms of a $1.5 billion proposal to fund a privately owned DreamWorks that would produce more than 30 films over the next five years.

Reliance executives are expected to hold sit-down talks with Spielberg reps soon in New York or Los Angeles, though things are going so well they might hold off flying in until a meeting to close the deal later this summer. The business plan being discussed would see Spielberg and top DreamWorks execs create a new company financed with about $550 million in equity funding by Reliance, a senior debt facility and possible additional equity from whichever studio is chosen as a theatrical distributor.

"Things are going well, and God willing we'll get there," said Schuyler Moore, a Strook & Strook & Lavan attorney representing Reliance in the DreamWorks talks.

God willing, indeed. Who knows, perhaps Mr Spielberg will even be persuaded to come out to India at some point, though as you can see from the article above the deal would be signed in Hollywood.

Reliance partners Bollywood's Top Film Family

2008-06-26T10:27:00.003+01:00

In India there is no greater or more popular actor than Amitabh Bachan (know simly as Big B) and he heads a family that includes his successful-in-his-own-right son Abhishek and his daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai (Miss Universe 1994), as well as wife Jaya. We learn today that Reliance BIG Entertainment has struck a major deal with them. From THR.com:

Reliance Big Entertainment, the film arm of the Indian conglomerate courting Steven Spielberg and other top Hollywood names, strengthened its Bollywood roots Wednesday by forming a pact with India's "first family" of filmmaking. RBE, a division of Reliance ADA, will launch a production entity with Amitabh Bachchan and his family of actors to produce films and television content, president Rajesh Sawhney saidtold The Hollywood Reporter. "If we want to engage globally, we have to engage with Hollywood. And that means engaging with talent," Sawhney said.

And

The new unnamed RBE-Bachchan entity will see RBE handle finance, marketing, distribution and other management issues while "the Bachchans will focus on creative aspects," Sawhney said. Without providing investment figures, he termed the agreement "long-term and open-ended." The Times of India speculated that the deal could be worth about $300 million, but Sawhney dismissed the figure as "baseless," adding that the investments "really depend on the nature of projects, which are still to be finalized."

So it is Big B meets BIG Entertainment. Quite the suitable match really. Big B writes about it on his own blog:

Because of the announcement of the Reliance Entertainment and our tie up, there was media bombardment from all sections. The phone was filled with queries and requests for answers and talk ins and bites from the electronic community. They are all friends and i consider it common courtesy to respond to them even if I am completely unable to comply with their requests.

Though for all things Bachan, log on to TheBachans.com

Being back in London briefly after Cinema Expo, I was amazed by how many people had read about the Reliance-Spielberg-DreamWorks discussions. It really has put India and Reliance on the world map.

Future of cinema advertising in Cannes

2008-06-20T10:35:00.004+01:00

For the fourth year in a row I had the fun and pleasure of moderating the SAWA (Screen Advertising World Association) seminar at the Cannel Lions Festival on advertising, this year called 'Cinema - the Medium where all ideal look big.'

This year we looked at interactive advertising, courtesy of the interactive 'human joystick' game created by Brand Experience Lab. We also looked at 3D advertising in cinemas, including Red Bull from UK and Superbock and Vodafone from Portugal.

All-in-all 470 people attended the session and we had to turn away some 150 unhappy late comers. Once again it was the single most well attended event of the Cannes Lions.

As an extra personal thrill for me the most prestigious award that evening went to an Indian agency in the Direct Marketing category:

The Direct Lions Grand Prix was awarded to JWT India, Mumbai, for the Times of India Newspaper entry 'Lead India'. Seven gold, 13 silver and 17 bronze trophies were given from a total of 1697 entries of which 183 were shortlisted.

We celebrated well into the evening, but still made it up for the meeting of the SAWA Digital Sub Committee (DSC) the following morning to tackle the many challenges digital screen advertising faces in being part of the DCI future.

Trades' view of Ambani-Spielberg / Reliance-Dreamworks

2008-06-19T13:18:00.003+01:00

The trades follow the scoop by WSJ that there are serious discussions underway for Anil Ambani's Reliance BIG Entertainment financing Steven Spileberg's break-away of Dreamworks from Paramount. THR.com notes:

Indian business group Reliance is considering a plan to invest $550 million in return for a 50% stake in a new version of DreamWorks, which Steven Spielberg would create after exiting his deal with Paramount.

The Mumbai-based conglomerate was approached as a potential DreamWorks investor by CAA and likely will take at least two more weeks to mull the proposition. Hired by DreamWorks chairman David Geffen, entertainment attorney Skip Brittenham has created a detailed business plan that would give Reliance a key role in the new DreamWorks but grant Spielberg extensive creative control of the reinvented studio.

Details including $500 million or so in accompanying bank debt could take the rest of the summer to sort out, and even the issue of ownership control remains fuzzy. Spielberg has been on the hunt for equity and other financing for several weeks or more. The interest from Reliance was first reported on the Wall Street Journal's Web site.

It is no small irony that the same issue of THR has an article called 'Global media gains will be built by BRIC', which observes that 'Growth in the roaring economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China -- the so-called BRIC nations -- will outpace the more mature markets of the U.S. and Western Europe, with PwC forecasting 13.6% average annual growth in BRIC compared with just 4.8% annual growth in the U.S. media industry and 5.4% in Western Europe.' It is just that the PWC report had not anticipated one of the Indian growth engines to set up a virtual studio in Hollywood.

Meanwhile Variety goes into more detail about the implications of this possible deal:

The emergence of Reliance as DreamWorks' principal new financier marks the latest and most dramatic example of talent -- and their agents -- aligning with outsiders and using other people's money.
Beyond emerging as DreamWorks' principal new financier, the Indian company closed development deals with seven Hollywood heavyweights.
At Cannes last month, Reliance trumpeted deals with seven production companies headed by high-profile thesps (Daily Variety, May 19) and this week pacted to pay each company at least $1.2 million-$2 million to develop projects.

More than one option

(Co) Daily Variety
Filmography, Year, Role
(Co) Daily Variety

And

Reliance's deals with Cage, Carrey, Clooney, Columbus, Hanks, Pitt and Roach will potentially give that talent the opportunity to fashion a finished script that can be shopped to studios along with 50% of the film's financing. That will allow the talent to make the most favorable deal possible, because if a studio doesn't want to pay a star or director's usual gross deal, the package can be shopped to another studio.
While CAA is steering Reliance at a deliberately measured pace, the Indian conglom likely sees the arrangement as getting its foot in the door. Reliance may well finance the films itself and make a distribution deal with a studio.

A very exciting time to be working in India, that's for sure.

Is Anil Ambani the new backer of Spielberg?

2008-06-18T15:08:00.004+01:00

Could Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks turn out to be the trump cards in the Ambani/Reliance/Adlabs ambition to expand in Hollywood? It would seem so, based on this report by Bloomberg and WSJ:

June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Steven Spielberg and Indian billionaire Anil Ambani are close to forming a venture that may help the movie director's DreamWorks SKG team exit from Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group will invest as much as $600 million in the studio, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter. The venture may borrow another $500 million to finance about six films a year, the Journal said. Reliance and Viacom declined to comment and spokesmen at DreamWorks were unavailable.

As of now it is still only a rumour, though an interesting one.

First photo from our Mastering Theatre

2008-06-09T15:13:00.003+01:00

This 3D article makes me sound sooo gay

2008-06-04T07:57:00.009+01:00

While I am busy preparing the 2K Keynote for this weeks Cinema India Expo, digital 3D intrudes in the form of AccessIT's latest announcement and an article that quotes me about the prospects of 3D for India's digital cinema. AccessIT first.

Almost a year ago at IBC I met with representatives of International Datacasting Corp. and Sensio, showcasing a product for Live 3D, whose USP was that it could be sent down a single HDTV channel. I knew that they had a winner on their hands, so it is no surprise that their technology will be implemented by AccessIT in their digital cinema network. from the press release:

Access Integrated Technologies, Inc. ("AccessIT") (NASDAQ:AIXD) announced today, its plans for the installation of 150 of its leading edge CineLiveSM product in key markets throughout the United States. The technology, which enables the live broadcast to movie theatres of both 2-D and 3-D events such as sports and concerts, will be added to those theaters that are part of AccessIT’s satellite network, all of which are part of the company’s completed 3700 plus screen Phase 1 digital cinema deployment plan. Installations of CineLive will begin immediately in 50 sites and are anticipated to expand to at least 150 by the end of 2008.

The releases will be handled by AIX's alternative content division the Bigger Picture. Carolyn Giardina's take in THR.com is that, "The move underscores a growing interest in this alternative content possibility," and that , "Deployment is set to begin immediately on the first 50 CineLive systems, which will include installation in key markets including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Access IT expects to have at least 150 in place by year's end."

The news brought a smidgen of cheer to AIX's share price, which came dangerously close to touching $2.00 last week, before climbing up to $2.37 in current trading.

Meanwhile 3D fever is spreading to India as well, ahead of talks about it in this week's Cinema India Expo 2008, where I will be presenting a Keynote on 2K Digital Cinema in India. DNA ran a story headlined 'Cricket cheerleaders in 3D? Possible…' that actually pre-empted the AIX announcement. (For those who wonder what 'Cricket cheerleaders' look like, they are American Football cheerleaders flown in for the IPL tournament):

Multiplexes are gearing up for their next leg of digitisation that may see 5,000 3D digital projections being installed by 2009. This means by next year, live-action screenings in multiplexes like IPL matches will promise an altogether new experience for viewers — by taking them as close to the action as is virtually possible.

This will also mean that those live-actions screenings that are hugely popular overseas, such as the U2 Live Latin American concert, may now also enter Indian multiplexes.

Currently, there's only one theatre in the country — Satyam Cinemas in Chennai — that has a 3D cinema or stereoscopic digital cinema projection in place. But by next year, most premier digital cinema chains like Adlabs and PVR will have 3D digital projections installed. Both the companies are currently in talks with digital cinema infrastructure providers like Real Image Technologies for 3D cinema systems.

I got interviewed for the article and got quoted towards the end about the prospects for 3D film productions in India:

No major 3D productions have been announced from India yet. However, Patrick von Sychowski, COO, Adlabs Digital Cinemas, says within the next 1-2 years "there should be some announcements on that front."

When asked if Reliance Big Entertainment has any plans to produce 3D feature films, Sychowski said, "Reliance has been the front-runner in a number of initiatives, so you never know."

Adlabs is part of Reliance ADAG, which acquired Hollywood-based DTS Digital Images, a company that industry observers say will help Reliance Big Entertainment supply technology solutions to the rapidly growing 3D content market.

Then comes the bit where the writer took some creative freedoms in interpreting my comments:

Sychowski said live action 3D films were "about a year or two" away for India and digital animation possibilities in 3D, seem more likely to be exploited. "Shooting in 3D requires two cameras held in close proximity, therefore making it more difficult to shoot SRK's six pack."

I had said that it was more difficult to "shoot Shahrukh Khan" but nothing about his six pack. Seriously. If that had been on my mind it would have been something about the ample charms of Preity Zinta, Bebo or, hell, even Rakhi Savant for that matter.

But I do think that 3D film making will have a considerable impact in India very soon. More about that and 2K at Cinema India Expo. I will post an update after the conference.

Reliance's second $1bn deal at Cannes, this time with the Hollywood 8

2008-05-19T06:35:00.007+01:00

The follow up to Reliance Big Entertainment's Billion Dollar film production deal was unveiled on Sunday in Cannes. It may not quite rival MGM's claim of 'More Stars than there are in Heaven', but it is not far off.

Deals have been struck with the actors and their production houses listed below, to develop scripts that will go into production with established Hollywood studios, with Reliance coming in as co-financing partner. The deal does not replace the existing deals that these production outfits have with Universal etal, but suppements.

- Nicolas Cage (Saturn Productions);

- Jim Carrey (JCB 23);

- George Clooney (Smokehouse Productions)

- Chris Columbus (1492 Pictures)

- Tom Hanks (Playtone Productions)

- Brad Pitt (Plan B Entertainment)

- Jay Roach (Everyman Pictures)

(+ one that is as-yet un-announced)

More details on thr nature of the deals form the Calcutta Times:

Another day and another billion announcement from Anil Ambani whose Reliance Big Entertainment today announced in Cannes that it will provide “development funds to eight leading creative forces in Hollywood”.
The value of the 30 films being developed jointly will be a billion dollars, “but this will not be the billion dollars that we talked about the other day,”said Amit Khanna, who is chairman of Reliance Big Entertainment and has been acting as the entity’s chief spokesman in Cannes.

“What it means for the average Indian is a sense of pride that India has finally arrived on the global media map,” Khanna explained to The Telegraph after his main press conference.

A billion here, a billion there... Pretty soon it starts to add up to some real money.

As the Times of London also notes, "the deals represent the biggest entry into the western media market by an Indian group and mark a reverse to the flood of money that has been poured into the Indian film industry by Hollywood production houses in recent months." Coming, as it does, not long after Sony, Disney and NBC-Universal's investment spree in Bollywood.

As my intrepid namesake P. Frater at Variety notes, these deals are not meant to rock the Hollywood studios' boat:

Deals are described as “production silos” under which Reliance Big Entertainment provides development coin to enable the talent to nurture or acquire movie projects before taking them to the studios with which they have first-look arrangements. In a second stage, deals allow Reliance to participate in up to 50% of a movie’s subsequent production funding and to secure rights in India.
“We are totally respectful of the existing first-look deals that each of our partners enjoys and are confident that the respective studios will welcome our development silos and our subsequent co-financing ability,” said Reliance prexy Rajesh Sawhney. “We are breaking completely new ground and not just as an Indian-based company.”
Khanna said the silos will likely become involved with 30 projects in the next couple of years, of which at least 10 will go into production. Reliance execs and CAA reps, who brokered the deals, were at pains to explain that Reliance coin is supplementary to the stars’ first-look deals rather than alternatives.
“We will increase the speed and safety of the elevator, but the destination is still the top floor,” said Reliance Big Entertainment CEO Amit Khanna"

The key to understanding Reliance ADAG is not to think of it as an Indian company abroad, but also to recognise it as a company that occupies the number one, two and three position in its home market with regards to the 'competition'. This is not boasting, but the distilled essence of my experience after more than half a year here. Reliance ADAG does not enter ANY market in which it is not sure that it will be number one and will do everything to ensure that position.

As an example, see the announcement on the same day of the launch of Reliance's Big TV DTH service into 4,000 Indian towns, which aggressively undercuts the competitions' prices while offering a better technology platform. Also on the same day, Reliance ADAG's gaming group Zapak announced its own $100m acquisition fund for expansion.

Given the size of such undertakings, the company is not interested in small deals and something like the Lowry Digital acquisition (a relatively paltry $7.m in comparison) was undertaken because it was strategic and would ensure the company became number on it this particular field.

Returning to Cannes, the second Billion Dollar Deal is particularly timely THR.com notes:

“This is a good thing for the studios with equity financing drying up thanks to the financial crunch,” said an agent from CAA, which brokered the deal. “It provides a new source of funding for the studios, and gives the studios a foothold in the India, a market they are all expanding into.”

If you doubt the crdit crunch impact on production, then read the IHT article 'Hollywood dreams face cold financial reality' and expect to read more in the future about what Mr Khanna (pictured above) calls "the reach and potential of India's steadily growing soft power".

Photocredit: Viewimages.com

Reliance's Billion Dollar Entertainment Baby

2008-05-17T07:20:00.007+01:00

The Cannes Film Festival is in full swing but I didn't make it this year. Instead it was my boss' boss who went there to announce Reliance Big Entertainment's Billion Dollar Plan.

While the company has previously been involved in film production and distribution, nothing could have prepared the world for the magnitude of this commitment to making films in India and beyond.

From the Economic Times:

CANNES: Reliance Big Entertainment, the media and entertainment arm of the $75 billion Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani group, on Friday announced that it would spend $1 billion on the Indian film and entertainment business over the next 12-15 months.

This is by far the biggest commitment made by an Indian entertainment company for show business. Amid the glitter and glamour at the 61st edition of the Cannes Film Festival at the French Riviera, Reliance Big Entertainment also revealed that 69 films in nine languages would be ready for distribution over the next 18 months. Over a dozen films will be released this year.

"India is uniquely positioned in the global economic order. We believe this is the right time to make this commitment of $1 billion for the film entertainment business," said Amit Khanna, chairman of Reliance Entertainment.

The best coverage of the Cannes event itself comes from the Telegraph of Calcutta:

The Ambanis don’t do things in small ways — and today Anil Ambani chose Cannes to make public what the media had been promised would be information on a “major and unique event”.

The news conference had been organised by DDA, a PR firm which usually handles established American and European clients. In the last few days, its publicists have been calling up journalists to make sure they would be in the Salon Diane of the Majestic Hotel to hear the announcement at 10am today.

It was left to Amit Khanna, chairman of Anil Ambani’s Reliance Entertainment Pvt Ltd, henceforth renamed the Reliance Big Entertainment, to drop the bombshell — the group would invest $1 billion (around Rs 4,250 crore) to change the face of the Indian movie industry as we have known it.

And the ambition is not confined to India alone. My very diligent namesake Mr Frater does a good job of capturing it all in Variety's 'Reliance sets out its very Big ambitions':

The company is expected to follow Sunday with further announcement about relationships and production deals involving Hollywood talent such as Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis. “It is time for Indian companies to step up and take on the world,” Reliance CEO Amit Khanna said.

From THR.com 'Reliance goes Big with billion-dollar unit':

Reliance's empire spans production, distribution, home entertainment and exhibition across the subcontinent and also has outposts in Sri Lanka and Mauritius among others. Khanna said the company plans to open offices in New York and Los Angeles.

Even our own little digital cinema effort got a mention at Cannes and in Variety: 'Unlike other digital cinema initiatives in India, Reliance Big Entertainment and its stock-market listed Adlabs unit, are rolling out fully DCI-compliant 2k systems.'

Yup, that's us. But more on those plans another time. Maybe Cinema Expo.

Ambani vs. Ambani showdown at the multiplex

2008-05-08T09:15:00.005+01:00

It was an open secret that Mukesh Ambani had ambitions and plans to challenge his younger brother Anil Ambani in the multiplex space. But it came as a bit of a bombshell that the person who might implement the ambition is Manmohan Shetty, the man who set up Adlabs Cinemas before it was acquired by Anil's Reliance ADAG. From the Economic Times:

Manmohan Shetty, the founder of Adlabs Films, is likely to team up with Mukesh Ambani. The Reliance Industries (RIL) chairman is believed to be in negotiations with Mr Shetty to get him on board to shape and run a planned country-wide multiplex operation.

The RIL group is looking at about 500 screens across the country, according to persons familiar with the matter. Mr Shetty was, till not very long ago, a key member of ADAG’s entertainment business.

As part of its retail entertainment plan, the RIL Group is simultaneously in advanced talks with Yashraj Films (YRF) to ink an arrangement whereby all YRF films will be released in the planned chain. The partnership is also being cemented across other areas, all of which are part of the RIL’s Group foray into the entertainment business.

The group is in the process of setting up the back end for the proposed foray, largely using fibre optic linkages. According to sources, YRF and Mr Shetty are jointly forming a content company, which will be the primary vendor for the RIL Group’s entertainment venture.

If RIL is considering fibre optic linkage then they are considering digital cinema (again, no surprise, as we knew this from our spies), but this is logical for anyone looking to enter cinema at this late stage. Mr Shetty denies the partnership as does a Yash Raj spokesperson:

Mr Shetty denied the development stating, “There have been no talks or discussions between either Mukesh Ambani or YRF with me. No such deal/deals have been signed by me.”

A highly-placed source within the ADAG group said Mr Shetty was still in the last stages of his exit from ADAG and might not be comfortable talking of future plans.

Sanjeev Kohli, director and CEO Yash Raj Films, also denied being part of the RIL Group’s entertainment plans. “YRF has not signed any deal and we are not aware of developments in the areas that have been mentioned. YRF will certainly share with the media their future plans when they take concrete shape.”

It sure keep life interesting out here in India and we will see who will drink who's multiplex milkshake in the end.

UPDATE 17/05/08: Mr Shetty has directly denied that he is in any discussions with Mukesh. If not Shetty then let's see who he will put in charge of such a major effort.

Warner and Sony go to India, Adlabs goes to Malaysia

2008-05-06T07:10:00.005+01:00

Having previously dipped their corporate toe in the warm flow of the Indian film production river, both Warner Bros and Sony Pictures are now taking the full plunge in. Sony has signed a three-picture deal with a major Indian production studio in a deal worth Rs 2.5bn ($62m), while Warners is pursuing a remake of The Wedding Crashers. From THR.com (as the-trade-magazine-formerly-known-as-the-Hollywood-Reporter now insists on calling itself):

In what would mark the first authorized remake of a Hollywood film here, Warner Bros. Pictures India is in discussions with Bollywood banner Orion Pictures for an official remake of the 2005 comedy "Wedding Crashers."

Orion Pictures, headed by producer Mukesh Talreja and director Nikhil Advani, is co-producing WBPI's Bollywood debut with veteran filmmaker Ramesh Sippy, "Chandni Chowk to China."

"We are in talks with Orion Pictures on the possibility of remaking 'Wedding Crashers' in India. Orion has shown keen interest, and they have lined up some of the best talent for this project," WBPI managing director Blaise Fernandes told The Hollywood Reporter on Monday, adding that a deal has not yet been signed.

Somebody at WB must have finally woken up to the fact that if Indian film producers see a film they like they will take the concept and make it their own. Without buying the re-make rights. That is how Three Men and a Baby became Heyy Babyy while Love, Actually morphed into Salaam-e-Ishq and most recently this Diwali's big Hindi release Ghajini is a remake of Tamil film also called Ghajini, which, if you liked this story of how "A man, suffering from short-term memory loss, uses notes, tattoos and photo's to hunt down his girlfriend's killer", Amazon suggests you might also like Memento. If you can't beat them, beat them to the re-make at least.

Sony Pictures has meanwhile gone one bolder, after the so-so performance of Saawariya, with a three picture deal that will put them firmly on the Bollywood map, as well as buying world-wide distribution rights to Hindi comedy Meerabai Not Out. According to Variety:

Uday Singh, Sony Pictures India topper added, "Sony has several established platforms in India -- TV, theatrical distribution, music and homevideos. We intend to put all these behind the film and make it one of this summer's biggest attractions."

Amongst other ventures, Sony Television India is currently screening the newly created IPL (Indian Premiere League) cricket matches that has viewers glued to their sets and advertising rupees pouring into the channel's coffers. In relation to the co-production deal, Times of India adds that:

Sony's investment sets a new benchmark for big budget movie making in India. In its deal with PNC, the first of the three movies will be a comic extravaganza set in Las Vegas. Titled Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram , the film is budgeted at Rs 70 crore. The two other films are in a conceptual stage. Says Pritish Nandy of PNC: ‘‘An investment by a major international studio like Sony shows the changing paradigm of Indian motion picture business.''

This comes not long after Disney went Bollywood, 20th Century Fox set up base in Nitin Desai Studios and NBC Univ bought a $150m stake in NDTV, leaving just Paramount still outside looking in. This is ironic, as the best article on Hollywood pushing into Bollywood (New York Times' Hollywood Starts Making Bollywood Films in India) quotes the aforementioned studio towards the end of the article:

“The importing of American films into India is not filling a gap,” Gareth Wigan, a vice chairman of Columbia TriStar, the Sony division that produced the film, said by telephone from Los Angeles. “You’re not bringing a dish to a bare table. You’re bringing a dish to a table where you have to move a lot of other dishes to fit in, and that’s not true in a lot of other countries.”
And so begins a strange competition to make the best Bollywood film, pitting Hollywood against India’s own studios, which make more movies and sell more tickets than any film industry in the world.
With international revenues increasingly important to the conglomerates that own the major studios, Hollywood wants to tap into India’s market. But indigenous films captured 95 percent of Indian box office sales in 2006, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. The figure is identical for domestic pictures in the United States, but just 35 percent in France, 33 percent in Japan and 12 percent in Britain, according to 2005 data published by two scholars, David Waterman and Sang-Woo Lee.
“There is no country on the planet, other than India and the United States, that approaches that level of domestic business,” Andrew Cripps, the president of Paramount Pictures International, said by telephone from Los Angeles. And so Paramount, too, is contemplating Bollywood productions.

Still contemplating, it seems.

Meanwhile Adlabs/Reliance has conquered another territory with the announcement that it has acquired control of the third largest cinema chain in Malaysia. From THR.com's hard working India correspondent Nyay Bhushan:

Mumbai-based Adlabs Films, which runs India's largest theatrical chain along with holding interests in film production, said Monday it has acquired a majority stake in Malaysia's Lotus Five Star Cinemas.

"We cannot reveal financial details or the equity structure but, as a result of this deal, we have acquired a controlling stake in the company which runs 51 screens," Reliance Entertainment senior vp Anil Arjun said in an interview. Adlabs is part of Reliance.

Arjun added that the newly acquired screens -- which will make Adlabs the third largest chain in the country -- will continue to show a mix of market leader Hollywood product in addition to Malaysian- and Indian-language films.

Add this to the 150+ screens in India and 240+ screens in the US, plus some more South Asian territories coming up and this is starting to look like a cinema empire in the making. Some more analysis is offered by Patrick Frater in Variety:

Malaysia is one of the fastest growing theatrical markets in Asia but remains significantly underscreened. According to government agency FINAS, the country had just 341 screens in mid-2007.
Lotus mainly runs small cinemas outside the biggest cities and has itself been adding properties over the last year. In terms of screen numbers alone it ranks behind Golden Screen Cinemas and TGV, in which Hong Kong's Golden Harvest was invested until last year, and ahead of Singapore-owned Cathay Cineplexes.
Adlabs' move is not the first into Malaysia by an Indian exhibition group. Pyramid Saimira, which operates over 250 screens in India, unveiled a joint venture early last year with Malaysian company Asian Integrated Industries. Besides cinema ownership, that deal is intended to create a network of digital cinemas and provide them with distribution services.

No wonder that the parent company Reliance Big Entertainment is "in talks with private equity funds such as US-based private equity fund Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company (KKR), billionaire investor Carl Icahn, Japan’s Softbank and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority for divestment of 10% equity" for "an estimated asking value...in the range of $500 million," according to the Economic Times.

Adlabs embraces the concept of megaplexes

2008-04-21T13:20:00.005+01:00

While I've been impressed by the standard of multiplexes in India, which are as comfy as anything in the UK and US (and the Ebony Lounges are even more luxurious - see above), I've always been puzzled by the fact that a 'multiplex' in India is only four to six screens. This means that even with flexible programming of up to three to four different films per screen each day, the choice is often limited as the dame film tends to jump between screens and when a blockbuster like 'Race', 'Krazzy 4' or the up-coming 'Tashan' play, 80 per cent of screen real estate is booked up.

So welcome news that Adlabs Cinemas (it would be them) are going to pioneer the concept of multiplexes in India, with screen counts in the double digits, which earns it the title of 'mega-plexes'. Here is what the Economic Times had to say about it:

As a part of its new venture, Adlabs will be setting up a number of megaplexes, which would be around 5-6 times larger than the size of a multiplex offering not only multiple screens for films, but also gaming, alternative cinema, sports and others.

"The idea is to create an entertainment destination which will have something for everyone. We will have megaplexes for those looking for entertainment through and beyond films," Adlabs Cinemas COO Tushar Dhingra said.

To begin with, Adlabs will open six megaplexes with each one spread across 1.5 lakh square feet in cities, including Mohali, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi. While, the plan for the first phase was at least 12-15 such destinations.

"All the six sites are at different stages of development. The first one is going to be either in Mohali or Hyderabad," Dhingra said without specifying when was the first project expected to be operational.

One of the reasons that there haven't been many 10-15 screen cinemas to date is that the multiplex concept itself is still less than a decade old in India, plus that real estate (reel estate?) is difficult to come by even for a five-screen cinema in places like Mumbai. But my colleagues over at Adlabs Cinemas also face hurdles in cutting through red tape to get permissions to open a regular cinema that make applying for permission for opening a nuclear power station in a place like UK seem like getting permission for a garage extension by comparison.

In other news, Adlabs/Reliance has partnered ImaginAsian, which means that we now have flagship screens in both New York and Los Angeles, though these are only the tip of the activities that this partnership will bring. As reported in The Hollywood Reporter:

ImaginAsian owns such properties as iaTV, iaRadio, Web portal iaLink, New York's ImaginAsian Theater and the ImaginAsian Center in Los Angeles, which offer a diverse range of Asian-inspired programming including comedy and variety shows, drama series, documentaries and features.

"The agreement with ImaginAsian is a nonexclusive media marketing agreement in areas such as advertising sales and content marketing with both parties sharing access to various kinds of programming," Mumbai-based Reliance Big Entertainment senior vp Anil Arjun said Wednesday.

All this and Lowry Digital too - Reliance/Adlabs is on a roll right now. Meanwhile we are not slacking off on the digital cinema side too, but more about that in a future post.

Reliance buys Lowry Digital Images from DTS

2008-04-10T10:54:00.004+01:00

I'm absolutely chuffed to pieces that the news is finally official - my new employer Reliance ADAG has acquired DTS Digital Images, better known by its original name Lowry Digital Images.

This is an absolute gem of a company and I was blown away when I saw the work they had done when I visited their facility as part of the EDCF pre-ShoWest tour in March 2007 (see photo above). IMDB has a list of a small selection the films the company has worked on, while there is a dedicated page on Amazon of DVDs that feature work done by Lowry. You can read an (old) interview with John Lowry himself here or a more recent one by Debra Kaufman here.

In hindsight, it was an unfortunate mismatch of expectations when Lowry digital Images was acquired by DTS in 2005, but the new ownership fits perfectly into both what Reliance and Lowry want to achieve. From the press release:

DTS, Inc. today announced that the Company has completed the sale of its Digital Images business to Reliance Big Entertainment Ltd., a member of the Reliance ADA Group of India.

The sale, which closed on April 4 for approximately $7.5 million in cash, marks DTS' exit from the image enhancement and restoration services business.

As my new boss says:

"DTS Digital Images, also popularly known as Lowry Digital Images, enjoys a superb reputation as the premier film imaging and restoration facility. The company fits well with the Digital Services strategy of the Reliance ADA Group in the global media and entertainment space," said Anil Arjun, Senior Vice President of Reliance.

So far none of the Hollywood trades seem to have picked up on it. The best write up so far has come from India's DNA newspaper:

It’s body of work includes over 300 well-known feature films — Casablanca, Singing in the rain, Sunset Boulevard, Indiana Jones trilogy, Star Wars Trilogy, James Bond classics — with output to DVD, 35mm film, digital cinema and Imax.
Industry observers said that this acquisition would help Reliance Big Entertainment to cater to the rapidly growing 3D content market with technology solutions for correction in original stereoscopic footage as well as re-rendering of 2D footage into 3D.
DDI recently provided custom image processing services for New Line Cinema and Walden Media’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth 3D, the world’s first digitally captured stereoscopic live action film shot in digital 3D.

Details on the last job mentioned can be found in a press release here.

Too early to go into details about the company's future, just don't expect Lowry to suddenly become some cheap restoration outsourcing service provider. It will remain the Gold Standard of quality content work in Hollywood and will only grow as part of the Reliance film services family.

India or China? I know which one I've chosen.

2008-04-02T13:38:00.004+01:00

Confession time - prior to coming to work here I never harboured any burning desire to visit India. I'd been in this part of the world when I came to Sri Lanka for my honeymoon (magic), but Bangkok and Hong Kong featured higher on my 'to visit' list than either Delhi or Mumbai.

I was, however, keen to do work with India as far back as my Unique days and even worked on digital cinema test footage of KANK for Adlabs while at Deluxe/Capital FX. (Ask me in person what my then boss told me when I made a long pitch in 2006 about why we should target India). Perhaps I should not be so surprised myself that I ended up here, given what I've been telling others about the Rise of India as a financial and entertainment superpower.

The fact that it is slowly becoming an economic super power was brought home by the recent acquisition by Tata of Jaguar Land Rover and the proposed take over of the Motorola handset business by Videocon. The London Guardian was prompted to publish an article with the headline 'Is This The Indian Century?':

There's a common theme to these Indian takeovers, thinks Bajoria. "For years, globalisation was something the west did to the rest. Now the boot's on the other foot." How should westerners feel about that role reversal? "If I were them I'd be bloody worried." Then Bajoria, who knows the UK so well he can tell you the train times from Charing Cross to Tunbridge Wells, tries to think up some consolations, before giving up. "It's a big change. Of course I'd be worried."
A funny thing happened to the world economy this year: it tilted. Pretty much ever since the 60s, America had been the undisputed centre of business. It had the biggest economy; the No 1 economic model (or so the zealots kept telling everyone); the blue-chip banks; the world-beating businesses. Le défiaméricain was how France referred to Ford, IBM and the rest, meaning the American challenge.
Then came last summer and the biggest banking crisis America has had in decades. The economy? Almost certainly in recession. The model? Obviously, no longer so exemplary. The banks? Some of the biggest are being propped up by money from governments in the Middle East and China.

The most interesting trend right now is not the rise of India, but how India is overtaking China amongst the four BRIC territories as a centre of attention for the media and entertainment industries. This came sharply into focus in private discussions I had at the recently concluded FICCI Frames 2008. The growth and attention that the M&E India sectors are getting are understamdable given the 18 to 22 per cent CAGR in the sectors, numbers backed up by the ever excellent Price Waterhouse Cooper report at FICCI.

I spoke to journalists from all three of the trades: Variety, Hollywood Reporter and Screen International. Two of them had sent their Asia correspondents based in Hong Kong and only one had a local report present. Both of the HK correspondents said that their HQ was putting pressure on them to ramp up their India presence and even more the Asia bureau to India. Disillusionment is setting in big time with China. Not only does the country restrict the number of Hollywood films shown in any year to 20, but recently the put a months' long ban on all Hollywood blockbusters. No one is holding their breath for the easing of these restrictions, as reported by the BBC:

China Film's import section is notoriously sluggish in its evaluation and censorship of films. Their choice of films is notoriously confusing and lacks commercial nous.

Moneyspinning blockbusters are often ditched in favour of showing smaller scale films such as Proof of Life, Stepmom and Meet the Parents. Each grossed less than $1m (£690,000) in China.

It is believed that up to six distribution licenses will be issued, with the Shanghai Film and Television Group one of the first.

A US film executive told Variety: "China Film has done a poor job.

"They've been very inefficient in distributing US and Chinese films. They had their chance and they did not deliver."

Hollywood studios have tried to get around this by doing co-productions, but at the moment I was told that Chinese authorities had put 50 co-productions on hold, including the latest Jackie Chan film. This following the withdrawal of notable international cinema exhibitors from the Chinese market.

Yet despite these restrictions US films flourish at the Chinese box office, as reported by Variety:

The Chinese film biz is certainly on a roll. China's B.O. surged 27% last year to $450 million. Two of 2007's top-grossing films, "The Warlords" and "Assembly," were Chinese co-productions, and Chinese films brought in $273 million from overseas sales last year, according to data from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT).

Meanwhile, foreign, mostly U.S., pics constituted 46% of China's B.O. in 2007. Hollywood movies made $158 million in China, up 38% from the 2006 total. Chinese B.O. for "Transformers" was a boffo $38 million, making it the fourth-largest market in the world for "Transformers" after the U.S., South Korea and the U.K.

If there was unrestricted access to Hollywood content, chances are that it would marginalize Chinese domestic film content to levels of countries like Japan, i.e. closer to 25-35 per cent or less.

This will never happen in India, which will happily export more audio-visual content than it will import for the foreseeable future. And it is not because of any restrictions imposed by the government.

Take the three wide Hollywood releases this week playing at my local Inox cinema:

One Missed Call: 10.50am, 11.15pm
D-Wars: 10am, 11.15pm
The Bucket List: 1.40pm

Notice a trend? If you want to catch them it is early morning or late night at the multiplex. The reason is that Inox (and all other cinema operators) can't cram in enough screenings of popular local hits 123 and Race.

Moreover, if Hindi film producers come across a Hollywood film the like, they will take the concept, give it a desi twist and release the result to greater local box office success than the original. I took great pleasure in giving my US studio colleagues a DVD copy of Indian interpretations of 'their' films at ShoWest. Disney got 'Heyy Babyy' ('Three Men and a Baby'), Sony got 'Partner' ('Hitch') and Universal got 'Saalam-e-Ishq' ('Love, Actually'). If only I'd found a DVD copy of 'Fight Club: Members Only' to give to my friends at Fox.

This is not to show that Indian's are as good (or bad) as their Hollywood counterparts at re-making others' hits, but that Indian culture is more resistant to outside change than Chinese.

This was very well put in an interview with Time Out Mumbai with French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot, in connection with his book 'Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China':

There's something in China that's sowing the ground for novelty in the global era. China has questioned its own traditions every 15 to 20 years over the last century. First there was the Communist Revolution, then there Great Leap Forward, then the Cultural Revolution and now capitalism. You don't find in China the kind of interest that you have with history in India. In India, change piles up through a process of accretion, but in China, it comes from wiping out and building up. This tabula rasa syndrome makes it easier for globalisation to take hold in China. In India, the resilience of tradition in culture – music and dance for instance – is strong and therefore India's cinema has been able to digest Hollywood. That doesn't mean that India is not part of the global dynamic. It is very much in it, partly because of the role played by the NRIs, especially those those living in the US – or between India and the US. In face, lifestyles conveyed by the diaspora is largely derivative – it comes from the American way of life and this is converging with the material inclinations of the Chinese middle class too.

That's why Chinese viewers flock in greater number to 'Sex and the City' than Indian ones. So it is not because I don't speak Mandarin or because it is a totalitarian one-party state busily oppressing Tibet that I don't live and work in China. It is because I believe that India faces a brighter future. But I still want to go and visit Hong Kong as a tourist.

I'm now COO of Adlabs Digital Cinema

2008-03-27T04:57:00.004Z

The cat was out of the bag at ShoWest already, but it's a nice coincidence that my 100th post on this in-frequent blog is the announcement that I've been appointed Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Adlabs Digital Cinema.

The news comes in a couple of articles that give details on Adlabs' expansion into the US cinema market.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Adlabs Films has finalized the acquisition of 240 screens across 28 U.S. cities, executives said Tuesday on the sidelines of the FICCI Frames media conference.

"We have acquired these screens that largely have the potential to cater to South Asian and other audiences in the U.S.," Adlabs Films COO digital cinema Patrick von Sychowski said. "Some of these screens were acquired from the likes of Regal and Landmark, among others."

While financial details were not given, Mumbai-based Adlabs -- which operates more than 100 screens in India -- has partnered with Knoxville, Tenn.-based Phoenix Theatres for its expansion.

From Variety, quoting my boss:

Company, part of billionaire Anil Dhirubhai Ambani's Reliance ADAG conglom, has quietly bought up cinemas across the U.S. and is poised to launch next month as a coast-to-coast mini-chain.
"It is important we are seen as an independent American chain, rather than an extension of an Indian company," said Reliance Capital senior VP Anil Arjun.
Reliance, in which billionaire George Soros recently paid $100 million for a 5% stake, has 250 screens at 28 North American locations. These include sites in New York, New Jersey, Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, San Jose, Los Angeles, Washington State and one at Union Station in Washington, D.C.
"We've been aggregating. We've bought long-term leases to small chains or mom-and-pop operations, not necessarily the best quality, but we are spending to improve that through things like improved A/C, sound systems and concessions," Arjun said. Total cost of the acquisitions and refurbishments was not revealed.

It is tremendously exciting and a privilege to be part of a company such as Adlabs/Reliance ADAG which has the vision, ability and financial clout to push through such massive initiatives. Expect to hear more from us in the future.

Reliance's motto, from the founder Dhirubhai Ambani is "Think big, think fast, think ahead. Ideas are no-one's monopoly." They certainly do, and I'm trying to as well.

George Soros pays $100m for slice of Adlabs and more

2008-02-11T09:29:00.000Z

US-Hungarian billionaire George Soros has invested a cool $100m for a three per cent stake of Reliance Entertainment, the parent company of Adlabs, which is thereby valued at over $3bn. From Variety:

Deal values Reliance Entertainment at some $3.3 billion, making it the most valuable entertainment company in the fast-developing territory.
Reliance Entertainment controls the Adlabs group, which is India's biggest film processor, and in recent years has diversified to become a front-running movie production and theater operation.
Group has been a leading investor in the fast developing FM radio sector, has plunged into Internet services and is on course to become a direct-to-home satellite TV platform operator later this year. It operates Zapak, a gaming portal; Big Adda, a social network and social media venture; Big Flicks, an on- and off-line movie rentals business; and Jump Mobile, a mobile entertainment venture.
New coin is to be used to expand Reliance Entertainment's activities in all these sectors and it is likely to tap other financing, including a possible partial flotation.

This is yet another major vote of confidence by a foreign investor in the Indian entertainment sector and the latest in a number of deals that have previously seen the likes of NBC Universal spending $150m to buy a 24 per cent stake in New Delhi TV (NDTV), Disney buying a stake in UTV and Warner Bros partnering post facilities Prasad and Prime Focus.

Not much later the news was confirmed that Reliance Entertainment will indeed float, with today's IPO of elaince Power set to make Anil Ambani the richest Indian, with the Reliance Entertainment IPO likely to make him the world's richest man.

Award for Adlabs Cinemas

2008-01-12T06:28:00.000Z

There's no nicer way to start the year than winning an award. The Golden Globes may have canceled the awards ceremony and a big fat question mark hangs over the Oscars, so I thought I'd share the good news that Adlabs cinemas bags retailer of the year award at the India Retail Summit 2007 in the Entertainment & Fun category.

I don't know what Tushar Dhingra, the COO of Adlabs Cinemas, said in his acceptance speech, but it must have been pretty sweet to beat out the likes of PVR, Cinemax and Inox, all of whom were nominated as well. Some of the reasons Adlabs won:

In the year to come, more than 20 million people are expected to watch a movie on an Adlabs screen. With 40 properties, 118 screens and counting, Adlabs Cinemas is the largest cinema chain in the country and is on its way towards redefining entertainment in India with its differentiated marketing strategy cutting across metros and non-metros. A customer service orientation has ensured that the company always remains in touch with its core consumer through pioneering initiatives like Mobile Box Office (which allows consumers to book seats and snacks online), easyticket TM (cashless transactions through mobile) and WOW (instant feedback) amongst others and living up to its promise of "never a dull moment" at an Adlabs cinema.

All that an digital cinema to come on top. But the time is still not right to discuss that yet.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

2007-12-24T05:26:00.000Z

Peace and Happiness to you all. As always, thank you to the many people who have helped and inspired me this year and I look forward to seeing you all in 2008, which promises to be an exciting year for digital cinema. No predictions here, but maybe in January. Thanks to I Can Has Cheezburger for the photo.

Incredible !ndian cinema goes US

2007-12-12T11:03:00.000Z

No sooner did I write the previous post about the cinema situation in India then the news breaks that my client Adlabs has acquired 200 screen in the US. While it is not the first time an Indian exhibitor buys into the US market, this deal dwarfs the acquisition of FunAsia's four sites in Texas with 17 screens by Pyramia Saimira a few weeks ago. Not only that but to put the size in perspective, Landmark Theatres operates 232 screens in 58 locations, while Muvico has 14 cinemas with a total of 259 screens. Both of these are US exhibition house hold names and so too soon will be Adlabs.

As of yet there is not detailed information about what the locations are. Also, I have not seen coverage yet by either Variety or Hollywood Reporter, which I find perplexing, but maybe they are pre-occupied by the WGA strike. Here is what DNA India has to say about it:

Making its first international foray, Adlabs has entered into multiple agreements with existing theatre owners in the United States to operate some 200 screens.

Precise details on this arrangement have not been made public yet as the deal has been executed by an Adlabs official in charge of developing international operations. The company refrained from divulging details stating it will be made public in due course.

Following the deal, Adlabs will have a footprint across the US covering 28 cities including the key markets in east coast (California is full of Indian techies), midwest and west coast (New York and New Jersey has a substantial Indian population).

These cinema theatres will be showcasing mainstream Hollywood films in addition to movies in the Indian languages viz., of Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.

I would expect more details to follow soon. If Pyramid Saimir is prepared to spend $75m to grow from 17 to 75 screens, you can bet that Adlabs will not settle for just 200. Also too soon to talk about digital, other than that I can assure you that whatever they may or may not launch will definitely NOT be e-cinema.

Consider this the first move, with more to come. True to their motto, there's never a dull moment when you are with Adlabs.

Incredible !ndian cinema market

2007-12-07T12:51:00.000Z

CineAsia is over and while it looked like an interesting programme and first year in Macau, I was unable to attend. What struck me about the details of the events, though, was that there was absolutely nothing about India in the whole three days - unless you count Real Image co-sponsoring a breakfast and the screening of 'Elizabeth: the Golden Age' (directed by Shekhar Kapur).

You might think that I have a thing about India at the moment, but it was Variety that recently began an article with the observation that "India is 'in the midst of a revolution' that will see the fastest theatrical growth in Asia in the coming five years." (Boom time for India's film industry - Country spends $2 billion on movies each year). This is based on a new report by Dodona examining the trends on the Asian sub-continent:

Dodona describes the Indian movie industry as "the largest in the world and one of the most fascinating." Growth is being powered by demographics and an explosion in numbers of multiplexes and digital cinemas.
"On the basis of current plans, in 2011 half of all the screens in the country will have been built or re-equipped within the past five years. Even at its height, the European and North American multiplex boom did not match this scale of investment," report author Katharine Wright said.

Based on my observations on the ground I definitely agree [and an apology to Dodona for previously getting my facts wrong on their Euro digital cinema reports]. But don't take my word for it. Here is what Adlabs and PVR have to say about it in their own words, from a Q&A in moneycontrol.com article ('What are PVR, Adlabs Up to?'), about how they will grow through acquisitions and newly built multiplexes over the coming years:

Q: A few issues the market is quite excited by about - the Adlabs now; one, there is rumour that you could probably looking at Sringar Cinemas for a buy out, is that true?

Venkat Devrajan, CFO, Adlabs Films: Whether it’s organic or inorganic, (we are) ultimately looking at the plan at which Adlabs is today. With 111 screens in the next 24 months, we are looking at at least 400 screens to rollout. So within that space whether any company comes by or we do it on our own as an execution project; at the end of the day it’s number that counts and that is what our plan is.

That's quadrupling the size of India's largest cinema circuit in just two years! If cinema growth like that doesn't take away your breath away, nothing will. And these are not idle boasts. And the growth of the multiplexes is transforming the entire Indian cinema landscape, as this article ('Multiplexes fast gobbling up India's single hall theatres') from The Economic Times makes clear:

From one multiplex in Saket, south Delhi, in 1997 their number today has crossed 400 across the country with about 20,000 screens, redefining the way films are viewed.

PVR Ltd, which brought this concept to India, has a total of 95 screens in 22 multiplexes across India, Fun Cinemas has 50 screens in 11 cities, Inox Leisure Ltd. has 19 multiplexes with 65 screens and Adlabs Cinemas has no less than 100 screens in 22 cities.

"Up to 97 per cent of urban youth prefer to watch movies in multiplexes," says a report recently released by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

"I can't even recall which was the last film I saw in single screen movie hall. The experience of watching a film in a multiplex compared to a stand-alone cinema hall is beyond comparison," Smriti Singh, a college student, told IANS.

And that's even before we get to digital, whether you are talking about e-cinema or true digital cinema. India is unique in having succeeded in having effectively establishing an alternative standard to DCI (UFO's MPEG-4 and E-City's MPEG-2) for all major releases, and even the odd Hollywood title (Snakes on a Plane, The Messengers). But that's a long posting for next year.

While a lot attention is being lavished on film and exhibition in China, it is easy to forget what a tightly controlled market it is and the risks that Hollywood studios and other Western companies face in dealing with the country. Not only have exhibitors like Warners effectively been forced to withdraw, but now Hollywood films face an un-official three month ban. From Variety:

In its most drastic measure ever against Hollywood, Chinese authorities have banned the release of American pics for at least three months.
Ban began Saturday and will continue until the end of February at least, but Chinese sources say it could continue until May.
Central-government order came from echelons higher up than the State Administration for Film Radio and Television or the Film Bureau, which normally handle movie industry policy and application. Ruling likely emanated within the Propaganda Ministry.
The Asian and Chinese arms of the studios have not been given any release slots in the first two months of 2008.

Unlike China, it is not restrictions or quotas that is keeping Hollywood films' market share low in India but the phenomenal success of the local market Hindi films (aka 'Bollywood'), Tamil, Telugu, Malayam language films and other local Indian film productions. Western films do show, but they just cannot compete with the success of the latest Shah Rukh Khan release. And Hollywood has started to take notice. The Sony produced 'Saawariya' recently outperformed Tom Cruise's 'Lions for Lambs' at the global box office. Not bad for a three-hour song-and-dance adaptation of a Dostoyevsky short story. Incredible !ndia indeed.

Lastly, the vertical integration and emergence of film exhibitors as producers and distributors means that the ground is set for digital cinema in a way that it can never be, because of the enforced separation between cinema owners and the Hollywood studios. The impact of this vertical integration and the emergence of producer-distributor-exhibitor power houses is examined in Glamsham.com's 'Multiplexes and the dawn of a new era':

The trend has also to be seen from the perspective that there would not be any acrimony about sharing of the revenue in the first week when the film is released. This trend is already there in Hollywood and it has slowly started gaining momentum in India. It is a healthy trend, as it would bring in further transparency into the business of filmmaking. The participation on the part of the cinema owners has increased as the investors into the shares of these companies have provided the capital for the same.

Next year I hope to be able to go into more detail about the digital changes taking place and facing India. So for now, Namaste to you all. It's 10pm and I'm off to the Adlabs Metro cinema, "Bollywood's most famous red-carpert theatre" (pictured above), where there is digital work to be done.

ODS piracy - or, How much does Arts Alliance care about Copyright Protection?

2007-11-07T09:25:00.000Z

When it comes to ODS piracy, it seems that some people are just too dumb to learn from past mistakes. Or maybe they don't think that protecting the intellectual property of alternative content is as important as that of regular Hollywood films.

I can find no other explanation for why the recent alternative content screening of The Who's 'Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who', including a live Q&A with the band's surviving members appears to have been transmitted UN-ENCRYPTED over satellite, just as the recent Genesis concert was also transmitted free for anyone with a dish a receiver to download recently.

With the revival and re-formation of vintage rock bands like Led Zeppelin and The Police, the level of interest in the special screening of 'Amazing Journey: the Story of The Who' was always going to be high, particularly as the survivors of the band were introducing the film and giving a live Q&A discussion afterwards. Tickets were selling well despite the relatively high price of £12.50.

Below is how Odeon, who was the exclusive exhibitor partner in the UK, described it on their website.

The high profile event received a lot of publicity, such as this article from UK music magazine Uncut, describing the evening:

The capacity audience included members of Keith Moon and John Entwistle’s families as Daltrey and Townshend answered fan questions put to them by Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson.

Also taking part in the Q&A session that was webcast to 16 countries worldwide, were Amazing Journey's director Paul Crowder and producer Nigel Sinclair, whose Spitfire Productions also worked on Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan doc, No Direction Home.

The event was organized by Arts Alliance Media (AAM), who were so proud of what they were doing that they put out a press release to mark the event. From it we learn that:

Making the event possible is Arts Alliance Media, who have maximised the ODEON digital projection infrastructure to bring this star-studded event live via satellite from the ODEON Kensington to 14 cinema venues across the UK, as well as MEC Vienna, Austria and UCI/Kinowelt Dusseldorf, Germany.
Paul Chesney, AAM’s Director of Business Development added, “This kind of alternative content helps cinema owners to attract a broader audience, whilst bringing people back to the cinema. Music events are ideal for broadcast at exhibition locations and we are delighted to be working with Universal and Odeon on this prestigious occasion.”

There's just one thing that AAM forgot in the hoopla of beaming this out to the world, which is that if you transmit valuable content you make damn sure you keep it safe. In the case of satellite you encrypt (scramble) the content, so that it can't just be picked up by anyone pointing their satellite dish at the skies. Or did Arts Alliance and their OB/satellite partner think that nobody would anticipate which 'bird' it would be sent over? Given all the advance publicity for the event, it was not difficult for amateur satellite enthusiasts to find it.

For full details, all you had to do was to log onto the discussion forum of German home-cinema website Beisammen.de and follow the thread called Live aus London in HDTV: Weltpremiere "The Who"-Dokumentation (05.11.) (You don't even need to speak German to work out what that means.) Here is what poster 'HD-Freak' had to say about it:

Das hat man selten: Live aus London ist jetzt die Weltpremiere des neuen Doku-Films über "The Who" zu sehen. In HDTV, 720p

Thor 1°West, 11486V; 13333, DVB-S!

Nicht zu fassen! Da sagt man den Kino-Besuchern bei der Begrüßung noch, sie könnten danach die DVD kaufen und jetzt zeigen die den Film in HDTV! Herrlich!

As the poster notes, there's no small irony in telling the audience members who have just paid £12.50 that they can buy the (standard definition) DVD on the way out when the 720p HDTV 5.1 surround sound transmission is available for free for anyone to capture off satellite to keep, share and re-distribute.

Scroll down and you find out that this was a world premier and that the DVD will not even be available on Germany until 7 December. But true German The Who fan's won't have to wait that long because the film is already available on peer-to-peer websites such as this one:

Although I'm guessing that this is a DVD rip, it is only a matter of time before the 720p HD version finds its way onto the net because some one somewhere recorded it off satellite, because the people responsible for organizing this event either didn't care or decided to ignore the danger that sending content un-encrypted entailed.

If I was Odeon or Universal Pictures I would be hopping mad, as this is content that their customers are expected to pay good money for (£24.99 full price for the 2-disc DVD, to be precise). There is also no small irony in the fact that AAM has signed a VPF deal with Universal, which would entail it distributing heavily encrypted DCPs of the latest Universal films, it appears not to have taken the most basic of precautions in sending a high def version of a Universal Pictures ODS ('other digital stuff') event to cinemas all over Europe. So much for these type of events "bringing people back to the cinema."

I have become particularly sensitive to the issues of protecting sensitive content when transmitting it over satellite, most recently as a result of the trials that the NORDIC 2.0 project has been conducting with Telenor Satellite Broadcasting. But more about that another time.

Thanks are due to my Inside Man who alerted me to this, but who shall remain nameless so as to protect him from the fall out that this ought to cause.

My digital cinema perspective on India

2007-10-29T11:27:00.000Z

I have been in India for one month now and this an incredibly exciting time to be here. The Sensex just crossed 20,000 - it took 20 years for it to pass 10,000 but barely 20 months to double that. Mukesh Ambani has overtaken Bill Gates as the world's richest individual. Were he to re-team with his younger brother Anil (who controls the Reliance ADA Group, which in turn controls Adlabs) - they would be worth more than $100bn between them, easily making them richer than the Walton family. Booming times indeed. And on the digital side things are no less breathtaking.

This past weekend I was asked to take give a presentation and chair a discussion on digital cinema at the India Broadcast Expo 2007. I provided some global numbers from Screen Digest and DCinemToday on where global roll-out stands, as well as getting into the nitty gritty of DCI, compliance, VPF, ODS and more. We then had a very stimulating panel discussion with the top names from India's D-Cinema and e-cinema sectors. A very sharp journalist from IndianTelevision.com was there, asked pertinent questions and had published an article on the event the same evening:

Cinemeta Entertainment CEO Raj Grover said, "We intend to get into metros and tier-I, tier-II cities across the country. A chain of about 50 cinemas is in the pipeline across Gujarat, wherein we are acquiring single theatres, thus taking up their complete management rights. Currently, we are in the process of choosing the right format and standard for projection."

Real Image which started off as audio and post-production has also become a significant player in South India, thanks to their Qube technology. Director Senthil Kumar said, "Although digital cinema is in the transition phase, it is driving local and national advertisers to this medium. It's helping them target audiences better. This meanwhile, is also helping us evolve a territory specific business models like we have done in Tamil Nadu."

UFO Moviez CTO Makarand Karanjkar however adopted a different stance. He said that UFO is an infrastructure provider and a facilitator between the distributor and exhibitor to make their business viable, cutting down costs significantly for them. "We figured out the business model first and then made the technology work for us," he said.

I couldn't have summarized it better myself. A lot of the discussion centered on India's e-cinema model, though Karanjkar insisted that it was 'digital cinema' as far as they were concerned and that the quality and security was on par with what DCI had come up with. (I had to bite my tongue at this and other occasions, as my main task was to moderate the discussion.)

Equally interesting is the fact that given the severe under-screening of India, IBE Expo convenor Anil Chopra predicted that we could see the growth of 100,000 new cinema screens to meet demand and that digital (e- or d-) had the potential to 'leap frog' by going straight for digital distribution.

There can also be no denying the success that UFO Moviez (not to be confused with the unidentified flying object spotted over Kolkata this Monday morning) has made of e-cinema in India. The Economic Times of India has a long article ('Reviving cinema halls') that gives a good perspective on just what they have achieved, noting that:

Digital prints have played a huge part in the growth of the industry and is one of the critical reasons that most of the big ticket movies can release with a bigger print run., While so far, UFO’s biggest print run had been 360 prints with Heyy Babby, Om Shanti Om (OSO) and Saawairya are expected to cross that. “Between the two we should release at least 650-700 prints if not more.

Though the theatres get booked only a few days before the release, OSO will be at least 350-400 and could go up to 500,” adds Mishra. From the 300 released last Diwali between Don and Janneman, it’s a big jump. Like Mishra points out, the fact is that digital prints are not only matching the analogue ones, but at times crossing them as well.

So while we laud what Christie/AIX has done to kick start digital cinema in the West, in India digital distribution of film to cinemas is already overtaking 35mm! Not just that, but in a more adulating article e-cinema is even credit with saving the environment. With a title like 'Digital cinema reduces carbon dioxide emissions, too' you would expect the interview with Raaja Kanwar to highlight the green credentials of UFO, and it does:

Digital cinema’s contribution is not merely restricted to commercial benefits. It has brought about long lasting positive impact on the environment as a whole. The technical solution has helped the Indian film industry curb environmental pollution.

Indeed, if you put up a dim image on a 50 foot screen with a single-chip DLP projector from Panasonic you are not going to consume as much power as a 35mm projector or a 2K DLP Cinema projector. But you are also not giving the audience a true quality experience.

These efforts have not gone entirely un-noticed in the West. MPAA's Dan Glickman is in town and lauded the efforts of India to stamp out piracy. As reported in the Hollywood Reporter:

Glickman lauded recent anti-piracy developments in India, such as the adoption of a resolution in the state of Maharashtra that makes video piracy an offense that carries a minimum sentence, but he added that "much more needs to be done."

According to MPA data, India's domestic industry suffers more from piracy here than do imported films, which account for just 20% of pirated goods. Despite the recent growth in theatrical revenue for Indian films overseas, MPA data indicates that in the U.S., home video revenue for Indian films has declined by 75% over the past three years because of rampant piracy.

Later in the article gets around to digital cinema, or the UFO version of it, noting that:

India also is home to the world's largest network of digital cinemas. Mumbai-based UFO Moviez operates more than 1,000 screens, but most are not compliant with the Hollywood studios' Digital Cinema Initiative guidelines. Dubbed versions of Hollywood titles therefore are not released on this system, given that there are only six DCI-compliant screens in India.

Instead of writing "most are not compliant" with DCI guidelines they should have written 'none are compliant' because they distribute in MPEG-4 format and only Sathyam has six 2K digital cinema screens in Chennai. On the tricky issue of why the Sony Pictures-produced Saawariya is being released on 250+ non-DCI screens, Glickman is forced to cop out with a "This is a commercial decision by the studio, and we really can't comment on this."

The reason is because there is no true 2K alternative in India. Yet. But that will change.

Yesterday the founder of Adlabs, Manmohan Shetty and his daughter Pooja, announced that they were stepping down two years after selling a controlling stake to Reliance. That's the very rich company I mentioned at the start of this blog. They don't enter a market unless it is to be Number One. They have already made Adlabs India's largest cinema chain. Next on their agenda is digital. Like I said, these are very interesting times to be here.

Greetings from India! (No time for Show East)

2007-10-09T09:04:00.001+01:00

The uncertain future of third party digital cinema funding in Europe - part II

2007-09-20T10:23:00.001+01:00

...or, There's Gold in Them Thar Digital Hills, But It's Not the Propspectors That Will Profit From It.

This is the second installment of my thoughts about the role of third party companies in the digital cinema transition in Europe. Here I will attempt to set out what the implications are of third party players being effectively sidelined from financing the transition to digital for European cinemas, what role they could and should still play and well as taking a stab at who the likely winners in this process will be.

The worst thing that could happen for third party players would be for the European Investment Bank (EIB) to become involved in the digital cinema transition. Despite its name, it is not an investment bank in the traditional sense and as such is not presently involved in any financing discussions that I am aware of. As the Wikipedia page makes clear:

The European Investment Bank (the Banque Européenne d'Investissement) is the European Union's financing institution and was established under the Treaty of Rome (1957) to provide financing for capital investment furthering European Union policy objectives, in particular regional development, Trans-European Networks of transport, telecommunications and energy, research, development and innovation, environmental improvement and protection, health and education.

The EIB is thus not interested in the funding or conversion of one or more cinemas chains in a particular EU member state. Digital cinema conversion would have to be a European Union policy objective for the EIB to get involved. And as there is no country or organisation that is pushing it forward - UNIC is too weak and the Franco-German axis under Merkel-Sarkozy has other priorities - I do not see it happening.

What this means is that each country will have to find its own way to digital cinema. Some will do it better than others, some will do it faster than others, some will manage to 'save' smaller cinemas, while for others it will shake up the exhibition sector completely. What it also means is that there is potential for third party players to have different roles in different territories. I am not precluding that they will be part of the financing of some of the installations that will take place. But as I outlined in the previous post, I doubt that they will end up playing a large role in the roll-out once most European territories take a serious look at how to switch over all of their cinemas to digital. It is this solidarity approach that mainly precludes the participation of third-party players, as they will not be able to strike VPF deals that cover small and marginally profitable or even unprofitable cinemas.

Where does this leave third party players? For a start they still have a large potential role to play in the transition in terms of providing installation and support services. There are over 30,000 cinema screens i Europe. If we assume a five year transition, that will mean 6,000 screens converted per year or 500 a month. Such an exercise will require major logistical support from companies with experience. Here too, however, third party players will have to form strategic alliances with the manufacturers (in the US it is Christie rather than AccessIT in the Christie/AIX partnership that have driven the 'locust' approach of conversion, whereby teams descend on a town with multiplexes and convert all te screens in one go witgh insect like efficiency) and existing installation companies. Going your own way as Arts Alliance Media did when it ended the partnership with Sound Associates after the first phase of the DSN installation is risky because established installation companies have something that new third party players don't, which is well established relations with the cinemas. In in the exhibition relations, it is always personal.

However, installation will require hiring, training and using an army of engineers who will not be needed once the installations are complete, unless you move them to the next territory. While service of digital equipment appears to be at a premium of 30 to 40 per cent compared to 35mm, this will still not be a large enough business to sustain third party players or all those engineers in the long term, hence most installation work can be expected to be subcontracted.

This is also why third party players are branching out into mastering (Technicolor, AAM, XDC), satellite distribution (AccessIT), advertising (AccessIT, Technicolor), alternative content (AAM, AccessIT), software development (AccessIT) and other anciallary services. But the truth is that without VPF deals the third party players are financially doomed and it has everything to do with accounting practices and exist strategy. Here is how.

Take the UK Film Council's Digital Screen Network. This would seem to be a straight forward enough deal. The UKFC has £12m to spend on converting 240 screens. Cinemas apply to join and AAM are hired to carry out the installations and maintain the network. Cinemas that join the DSN apply for funding from the UKFC, pay that money to AAM who install the equipment. AAM then pays the vendors for that equipment. Except that's not how it works. AAM secures a loan with Barclay Capital which pays for the equipment. It then keeps the money from UKFC, paid via the cinemas, making sure that it pays interest on the loan each month. Read the fine print on the contract the cinemas sign with AAM and you will see that the equipment is collateral for the loan and legally belongs to Barclays, at least until the loan is paid off. What it means is that AAM now has a digital cinema network that they effectively run and control (or at least did, until they had to swap out the QuVis servers for Doremi, making it possible for anyone to distribute DCPs and KDMs directly to the cinemas) but more importantly, they have a war chest of around £10m to help fund future digital cinema plans.

It is important to stress that there is nothing illegal or un-ethical about AAM handling it this way. It is all strictly above board. In fact, it is the way that a lot of financial activity works these days. As long as they keep paying off what they owe Barclays everything is fine. I'm not telling you anything that isn't common knowledge in the industry. However, it also means that AAM cannot do anything with the QuVis servers they swapped out - because they belong to Barclays and not AAM! They cannot be sold, rented or dumped into a landfill. My guess is that they are sitting in a warehouse somewhere collecting dust. But the UKFC's DSN is not the standard way for financing digital cinema deployment. And this is where things get REALLY interesting.

Equipment such as digital cinema projectors and servers need to be paid for up front. Manufacturers don't like to be promised a share of VPF for however many years to come. So third party players like AccessIT and AAM do deals with banks and lenders such as GE Capital and RBS, who do similar deals for airplanes, truck fleets and other big capex projects. These deals are under written by the equipment and the VPF deal securing the loan. Over time the VPF deals are used to pay off the loan, with the third party player keeping a slice of the VPF deal above and beyond the additional maintenance costs, which is their profit. But where third party players make things interesting is where they start counting the VPF as income for the company. Not a fee that is used to pay off the equipment cost, but an income.

Your gut reaction will probably be that VPFs are not 'income'. And in one sense you would be correct. They are a time limited fee that distributors have agreed to pay towards the cost of the digital cinema equipment, facilitated by the third party player. But for accounting purposes they can be counted as an income to the company. And the reason for that is that the value of a company is determined in multiples of the annual revenue, as well as how profitable that company is. So if I'm Acme Digital Cinema and I have lots of VPFs passing through my account on paper I am very valuable. Which brings us to the exit strategy.

Leaving aside Technicolor, whose exit strategy is that they don't want to exit the market, Acme Digital Cinema has one of two exit options. The first is to get sold to another company or to float on the stock market. If you are already on the stock market, you want to increase your share value or even move to a better stock market (as AccessIT did when it moved to NASDAQ). When I joined Deluxe people were still speculating and asking me how long before Deluxe bought AccessIT, though most people seem to have accepted by now that Deluxe are sticking with its stated aim of not getting involved in deployment side of digital cinema.

So while mastering, advertising, etc. might provide a small profit to third party players, even put together these anciallary services are too small to increase the perceived value of the company as much as VPF deals do. There is thus no small irony that some of these niche pursuits might be more profitable than skimming off VPF deals, but they are still less interesting to third party players because of how markets work. Of course, any accountant going through the books of Acme Digital Cinema will spot that the VPF deals have a fixed end date. But Acme would argue that by this stage they will have grown the business through other means and be dominant through first move advantage. Prior to Enron and Sarbox accounting practices would have been much less transparent and more suspect.

I for one don't know what AAM or XDC's owners' ultimate goal is. But I suspect that they are not in this for the long haul, by which I mean more than 10 or 20 years. As investors or VCs they want to see a pay-off and an exit. And an exit is best when the company's share price peaks or it is at the height of its perceived value.

There is no reason for cinemas or anyone else to cry foul over this. In fact, cinemas should know this better than most. In the UK most cinemas right now are owned by investment vehicles. The loans that were raised to buy them were secured by real estate deals (ownership or lease of the properties they are in) and a guaranteed income based on content supplied by other companies, primarily blockbusters and advertising. But having a direct VPF deal in place means that the new (perceived) income goes towards increasing the (perceived) value of your investment, rather than someone else's investment in a third party player. Now you see why cinema owners resent the paychecks and share options given to the managers of the third party players get. It is not the VPF itself, of which the third part player will keep relatively little, that matters, but the flow of VPFs through the third party player that counts.

So what can and should the third party players do? Just as with any big infrastructure or IT project, such a computerizing patient records for all hospitals, once a governments decide that it needs doing, it will not do it itself but subcontract that work through open bidding. That's what the UKFC did with the DSN, awarding it not to the company promising to do it cheapest (the funding was fixed) but to the company they thought would do the best job. (And just for the record, I think that they absolutely made the right choice.) Third parties don't like open bidding and would prefer to do deals directly with distributors and cinemas but they may have no option but to go down this rout. And while many companies get rich off government contracts, it also introduces a whole new level of accountability and accounting limitations. It also means installing digital in those pesky and small unprofitable cinemas located in villages far off the beaten track that drive up installation costs and put a damper on profit margins.

Despite all this there is a role and profit for third party players to be had in the digital future. Unfortunately for them it is not what they think or are planning for. Over time, what was AAM's greatest success, i.e. securing the VPF deal, risks becoming an albatross around their neck. As I wrote earlier, the terms of funding digital switch overs in places like Norway (whose example I believe more and more European countries will follow, with variations for funding mechanisms) precludes AAM for implementing its VPF deal there. In contract, XDC are lucky enough (though maybe they themselves don't see it that way) not to have a similar VPF deal in place. Yes, there are many jokes being made about the number of times XDC's business model has switched. But in the Darwinian market place, having flexibility and being able to adjust to changing market conditions is a pre-condition for survival. Sooner or later XDC will get it right, because they have enough funding to keep trying got a long time yet. Staying the course with the VPF model, however, does not allow that sort of flexibility.

So if not third part players, who will profit from the digital switch over? Here I must declare an interest and not just because I always joke that the only people to make money from digital cinema are consultants and conference organizers, but because I had the privilege to work for two of the companies that I believe have steered the right course heading into digital cinema.

Essentially, it is the comapanies that ignore the lure of the VPF and focus on the ancillary services.

This means companies like Unique Digital, whose Norwegian sister company Unique Promotions recently became Unique Cinema Systems, after merging with two of Norway's largest cinema service, installation and consulting companies (check the link and, yes, she really works there, they didn't just get her to pose for the photo in the NOC). As far back as three years ago when I joined Unique we saw the writing on the wall that the future did not lie in selling digital screen advertising servers and a switch was made to supplying software and solutions that fit in around the cinemas and cinema advertisers' needs and worked with whatever digital set up they had in mind.

It also means companies like Deluxe, which stuck to what they do best, though even for them it could end up being a semi-Pyrrhic victory if they end up with a larger slice of a smaller pie for digital compared to 35mm. It means installation companies like Sound Associates, who will be essential to upgrading cinemas to digital and then keeping them supplied with spares and . The winner will thus be relatively small companies that stick to what they know and grow with the exhibition market and its changing needs.

In the California gold rush it was not the prospectors who got rich or built up a long term business, but the companies and men smart enough to sell them pick axes and shovels or even shipped their laundry to Hawaii. The cinemas and distributors know where the gold is and in the great rush to them thar digital hills they won't share this wealth if they can help it. But even if they are to prospect it themselves, they will still need to buy that shovel from someone.

The uncertain future of third party digital cinema funding in Europe

2007-09-18T10:59:00.000+01:00

...or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love State-Led Digital Cinema Funding Initiatives.

Having attended a number of national and international conferences and events around Europe there are growing signs that third party middle men are increasingly likely to be sidelined in Europe's digital cinema transition. I realize that this is a pretty strong statement, so here is the evidence that I have come across in as much detail as I can and am allowed to give.

Norway - I keep banging on about this one, I know, but given that they are still the likeliest candidate for being first in switching over all of their cinemas to digital they are well worth watching. With the government having pledged to support 50 per cent of the cost of the conversion, with 15 per cent coming from cinemas, 35 per cent from distributors and no cinema left behind, there is no room in this funding equation for any 3rd party financiers. The funding vehicle will instead be set up by FILM&KINO and in order to qualify, cinemas cannot dip into any other pot of money, be it from Arts Alliance, XDC or anyone else. This goes for municipally owned as much as for private cinemas. So far, so obvious, but what about the rest of the Europe that does not have such a unique cinema structure and big pot of money to spend on them?

Germany - A few weeks ago I attended and spoke on the 'Kino mit Zukunft' (Cinema with future') panel arranged with the FFA. What was interesting was the difference between what was said in public on the panel, which was detailed and interesting, and what people were prepared to tell me off-stage and off the record. Germany has far reaching plans for how to help the cinemas go digital and they are looking to apply the 'Norwegian model' but in reverse. I'm afraid that I can't go into more detail than that at this time, but I hope more will be revealed elsewhere soon.

This is very advanced thinking and the key is that the money is raised through the cinemas with upfront loans to pay for the cap-ex, but it would not involve third party financing. This was largely echoed at the IBC conference where at the D-Cinema Conference Day a presentation was given by Chris Koppelmeier (you can download it other IBC presentation for free as MP3 files here) left no room for third party funders in his overview of the German situation, even if it did not give the most up-to-date status of the plans. Having previously championed the 'Solidarity' model for conversion, it is perhaps no surprise that Germany should follow Norway's lead in planning for a conversion that would by state and exhibitor led, rather than by third parties and financial markets.

Remember too that German is still stinging from the media stock market crash that coincided with the bursting of the dot.com bubble that dragged down a lot of cinema and production companies only a few years ago. They have thus little wish to leave the digital transition to the vagaries of the market.

France - Another interesting presentation at the same IBC session was given by Lionel Bertinet from the CNC. Although he did not go into the level of financial detail and analysis that hid German colleague did, his message was all that more starker. On a slide titles 'The Answers and the role of the government' it stated that "A collective approach is needed." But this was followed by the even stronger statement "There will not be an answer from a third party financier." The means would be an adaptation of CNC public fund, if I understood him correctly. He did concede that pure public financing was not the answer either, but the tone had been set.
I tried to ask him and his German colleague what if any role, in that case, they saw for third party operators, such as those on the panel with him at IBC. The question effectively got swept under the carpet, but when I spoke to him afterwards he conceded that there wouldn't be no role, i.e. there would be some role, for the Arts Alliances, AccessITs and XDCs of this world. But the feeling was that they would not be driving the digitization of Europe. [What that 'other role' will be and the implications that has for third party companies I will get into a later companion post to this one].

UK - It is no small irony that when David Hancock gives his very good presentations of the digital cinema numbers around the world he qualifies the UK's lead by pointing out that it is a 'distorted' market because of public funding underpinning most of the deployments, which are the UK Film Council's Digital Screen Network. Unlike France, the UK is not known for state intervention, particularly when it comes to the film and cinema industry, which it sees as an 'industry' rather than as 'culture'. There was a feeling that now that the DSN is fully deployed and operating very weel, the UKFC had got the snowball rolling and could expect the industry to step in and finish what Pete Buckingham and Steve Perring had started. But that does not appear to be the case.

At the recent meeting of the UK Digital Cinema Group (now taken over by the DCMS from was the DTI) Pete Buckingham spoke ardently and passionately about the need for a digital switch over (DSO), whereby cinemas are migrated to digital much like terrestrial television is being switched to digital in the UK, rather than what he called digital deal making (DDM), whereby this third part operator does a deal with those cinemas and some distributors. Market failures would thus be remedied by a softly-softly public approach and assistance. This is in line with previous ideas that had been floated about the UKFC or a related entity facilitating the switch, much like the the Cinema Buying Group is preparing to do in the UK.

Third parties were already in danger of losing out in the UK because major cinema chains like Odeon-UCI, Vue and others are negotiating directly with distributors about a bilateral VPF deal that would not involve third parties. Given that most UK exhibitor operators are owned by banks or VC it should come as no surprise that they are not keen on other banks or VC getting in on the action.

But let's turn the situation around and look at it from the perspective of the third party companies themselves. Arts Alliance Media are currently top of the class, having announced Europe's first VPF deal at this year's Cinema Expo. But looks closer and talk to industry insiders and this claim-to-fame starts looking distinctly thin. It was set to be announced as far back as ShoWest and being pushed into announcing it with just two Hollywood studios and no exhibitor takers does not look like a position of strength. Remember that Christie/AIX had commitment from three studios within the space of one month and provisional deals with the others before the end of 2005 (yes, it really was two long years ago). I'm sure that AAM will get more distributors on board and sign up cinemas too, but unless they have a Carmike moment, their deal will not impress anyone for long. More importantly, they will have to explain how their 7,000 screen deal holds up on a country-by-country basis when territories start to fall of the road map as government initiatives are unveiled.

What then of AccessIT? Having said on stage several times that they would start international deployment before the end of 2006, they appear now to have changed plans and are focusing on the next 10,000 screens in the North American market instead. Internationally they are selling their software and possibly looking for partnerships, but are not out there signing VPF deals. This is a smart move, in my view. The international market is risky and costly, whereas they have a head start in the US and do well to consolidate this position before DCIP get rolling.

XDC meanwhile have the advantage of already being in Europe. In fact, in lots of European territories. And therein lies part of the problem. The company does not have any one territory where it is particularly strong. It's home market Belgium is out, as Technicolor snatched Kinepolis way from them (more on that later) and while they are big in German speaking territories such as Germany, Switzerland and Austria, this territory is so large that even big numbers do not add up to enough. If you discount Luxembourg XDC lacks critical mass in any given territory and is even getting dragged down somewhat by the e-cinema legacy of Sweden's Folkets Hus 1.3K deployment. XDC has a lot of funding and good will from their investors, so I would not write them off, but they too need some variant of VPF deal to prove that the digital cinema know-how that they have built up can be put to good use. (My sources also tell me that they are having 'issues' with the MPEG/JPEG hybrid server, so I'm sure a lot of focus goes into that at the moment).

Technicolor. More than a year has passed since Technicolor announced it's deal with Kinepolis to convert all of the Belgian exhibitors screens to digital. So far, no VPF deal has been announced and the deployment has been limited to 30-odd Dolby servers. Technicolor also appears to have lost the appetite to announce deals with any other exhibitors until it can sort out Kinepolis. Proud though they might have been to have got Kinepolis on board, I'm sure the Technicolor people recognise now that announcing an exhibitor deal prior to having a VPF deal is putting the carriage before the horse, Unless they want to fund the equipment and installation out of their own pocket, that it. So not only has Technicolor's Kinepolis deal stalled but at IBC word reached me that Denise Hsu, VP Business Development at Technicolor and in charge of the international digital cinema deployment plan has left the company (though if she really has left, then she appears not to have updated her LinkedIn page yet). One of her Technicolor colleagues working with her is said to have left as well. To have the key person responsible for international deployment (see my blog post about her speech at IBC last year) quit before it's even got underway means that she has either got an incredible job offer elsewhere, so good that it is worth giving up being in charge of the single greatest transformation of Technicolor's history, or that she lost faith in the task. Similarly to AccessIT, I'm guessing that Technicolor is focusing on the North American market but they cannot announce that they are walking away or have given up on the Kinepolis deal.

It thus seems that while none of the above companies are drowning, they appear to do little more than treading water in Europe at the moment. In my next post I will look more closely at the role they could still play in the deployment of digital cinema, but why this still spells bad news for them, as well as looking at who will really profit from state-led European digital cinema conversion plans.

Microspace reveals US and European ambitions

2007-08-21T17:28:00.000+01:00

It is often the case that small and smart companies profit in major transitions such as the digital cinema conversion. Microspace is shaping up to be just that, having doggedly persisted where larger corporations like Boeing and Elsacom have had little impact. Now it looks set to be in 500 North American locations by the end of 2008, which is impressive if you consider that this represents ten times that number of screens. But the company's ambitions do not stop there, according to this article from THR:

Meanwhile, the company is looking to grow in new markets. "We are looking to Europe being our next area of expansion," said Curt Tilly, Microspace's manager of digital-cinema distribution.

Methods of delivering digital-cinema content include shipping hard drives and satellite distribution. "For a small number of locations, satellite delivery for any industry doesn't make a lot of sense," Tilly said. "Our rough break-even point, we think, is about 400 locations. We can go back to the studios with 400 locations and say that we can be more cost-effectlve than the process of duplicating drives, shipping drives, tracking drives and getting them back. There are also advantages with security; satellite delivery is getting more secure than a hard drive.

It will be interesting to see how they tackle a heterogeneous market like Europe. 400 might not sound that much, but taking into account the different release windows, lack of pan-European exhibitors of sufficient size (even Kinepolis and UCI aren't big enough) and different wishes from different studios and their service companies (Fox still aren't keen on satellite last time I checked).

Microsapce will also face competition from European competitors. Just don't expect them to be Astra or Eutelsat. The European Microspace is out there, but keeping a low profile at the moment.

The perils of not encrypting your ODS content

2007-08-16T16:39:00.000+01:00

Maybe they figured that no one would be interested in it once it was not live. Maybe they thought that the file would be too big for anyone to re-distribute. Maybe they just didn't think that anyone would be interested in Phil Collins.

Whatever the reason, it appears that the Genesis live concert that was beamed to cinemas in UK (Vue) and Sweden (Folkets Hus) and Spain and Ireland, was sent over satellite UNENCRYPTED in full 720p 5.1 channel glory. And, yes, someone pulled down the signal to their home for free and recorded it.

Here is the website that describes how it happened (it is in German, so here is a Google translation into English). The technical level of detail is impressive:

Bertragen wurde das Konzert in Kinos in England, Irland, Spanien und Schweden. Bertragungsdaten: HDTV 720p - 16:9, mpeg2, Dolby Digital 5.1 EX. - Bilder vom Mitschnitt der Livebertragung fr die schwedischen Kinos, unverschlsselt (!) auf Thor (1¡W 11531V 13333 7/8), gesamt 17,7 GByte, ca. 160 Minuten. Zu Anfang gab es die Einblendung des Genesis-Logos und ein kleines Video mit diversen Covern der Studioalben der Band gefolgt von einigen Backstageaufnahmen.

Even at 17.7Gb I'm sure it is only a matter of time before it appears on P-2-P file sharing sites before too long. High def porn and 'Serenity' already is.

Jack Valenti, we hardly knew you

2007-07-24T15:21:00.000+01:00

I once bumped into Jack Valenti in a corridor in Bally's hotel in Las Vegas during a ShoWest. What intrigued me was that he was merrily munching from a bag of popcorn. Forty years of working for Hollywood and he still hadn't tired of the white stuff! Though he was more of a friend of the studios than cinemas - not surprising as the former paid his wages - it is appropriate that his memorial service was held at the ArcLight Cinema Dome in Los Angeles. Both the LA Times and New York Times were there to record the event.

For someone so much in the industry's eye it turns out we knew very little about the man himself, at least based on what his daughter had to say about him. From the NYT:

Ms. Valenti said her father had called her “my tumultuous daughter,” and there was much history, and much love, between them. “I was a moody and emotional kid,” she said. “But thanks to my lovely team of therapists, that he shelled out for, I’m able to embrace our past.”
Her father was also the kind of man, she said, “who shows up at his daughter’s birthday party at 1 a.m. so he can give her a hug.”
Saying her father had “more energy than me and all of you,” Ms. Valenti lamented what her father would miss: movies, elections and “the conversations about how incompetent the president is.”
“I hope I’m not betraying his confidence,” she quickly added.

While in the La Times Hollywood's Who's Who line up to pay tribute without getting too sentimental or reverential:

"He was the human equivalent of the iPhone," Steven Bochco, the creator of "NYPD Blue," said during the service. "He was a small, sleek package with irresistible features."

While he will never live down his 'VCR-Boston Strangler' comment even in death it is good to hear him getting recognition for the work he did for the likes of Friends of the Global Fight. A little bit of Hollywood history dies with him.

Korean TV show goes big in Japanese cinemas

2007-07-13T13:09:00.000+01:00

With Transformers upon us, The Simpsons Movie just over the horizon and Sex & the City big screen adaptation confirmed, it's interesting to see television shows in their original format making it onto the big screen. The show the single-handedly made Korean culture a hit in Japan will be re-screened in cinemas in Tokyo, according to Screen International article:

A special version of Korean hit television drama Winter Sonata will be screened at Toho's flagship Roppongi Hills cinema in Tokyo.

All 20 episodes of the series will be shown on Tuesday mornings from July 10 to September 11, featuring extra footage only shown once previously on NHK's BS satellite channel and unavailable on DVD. BM Inc is handling the theatrical distribution of the series.

As Roppongi Hills is one of Tokyo's key multiplexes, Winter Sonata is fighting for screen space against Harry Potter And The Order Of The Pheonix, a live-action feature based on hit TV anime Saiyuki and the latest installment in the popular Pokemon franchise, all opening on July 14. Seven of the cinema's nine screens will show the episodes on July 17.

All of the multiplex's nine screens had show the last episode of Japanese TV drama Hotelier (a re-make of a Korean series by the same name) and set a one-day record of 2,000 admissions. This is said to be "part of an increasing trend of TV viewership in cinemas" in Japan.

I do not know what they charged for tickets, or even if they could - the article reveals that the screening had sponsors - but it is interesting to see this happening in the home country of high definition, which has been slow to embrace digital cinema.

How to make European cinema sexy

2007-07-09T10:51:00.000+01:00

Post-Expo summary of European situation

2007-07-04T20:42:00.000+01:00

I'm too lazy and busy to do a post-Cinema Expo summary, but fortunately FJI's new digital cinema editor Bill Mead has already done the work for me in this article. It is an excellent snapshot of where things stand in Europe:

Nowhere else in the world is the digital-cinema rollout more complex than in Europe. Compared to the U.S., where similar virtual print fee (VPF) arrangements have prompted an initial first wave of installations from exhibitors, Europe has more difficulty finding the common ground among the exhibitors, distributors, and digital-cinema providers on which equitable financial sharing arrangements can be built. In Europe, as elsewhere, the question of "who will pay" has evolved into a series of follow-up questions about how to develop equitable cost-benefit sharing deals that are fair today and are sustainable in the future.

Europe is a diverse market. Not only are there cultural factors but business and economic factors contributing to rollout complexity. There are more than 800 distributors operating in Europe and the mix of Hollywood studio and locally produced content varies by country, typically averaging around 70% imported titles. 35mm prints tend to be crossed-over between theatres more than in the U.S., so any print savings have to be spread across multiple theatres. There are also more theatres which are either part-time or with a relatively low annual number of admissions. Overall lower screen counts result in lower economy of scale from creating digital copies.

The article doesn't include details of AAM's two VPF deals, but I'm sure that will come in a future issue. For now, hats off to FJI's new digital cinema editor for a strong start. Andreas Fuchs has pulled the heavy European digital cart at FJI all by himself for too long.

Good article on Technicolor's digital effort

2007-06-29T10:35:00.000+01:00

Business Week has a good article on Technicolor's efforts in the digital cinema space. It gives both historical and current market context:

Technicolor, which was bought in 2000 by Thomson (TMS ) of France for $2.1 billion, is up against an aggressive new entrant, Access Integrated Technologies (AccessIT), as well as Digital Cinema Implementation Partners (DCIP), a joint venture of the three biggest theater chains, Regal Entertainment (RGC ), AMC Theatres, and Cinemark (CNK ). This summer could be the tipping point in the digital transition, as the number of U.S. theaters capable of showing movies in digital form finally exceeds 10% of the 35,000 U.S. screens. "This is a disruptive technology environment," says AccessITCEO A. Dale "Bud" Mayo.

Technicolor was founded in Boston in 1915. Swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks was enchanted by the possibility of making a pirate movie in color and relied on Technicolor's cameras to shoot The Black Pirate in 1926. The company received important boosts from Jack Warner, Warner Bros. co-founder, and Walt Disney. By the 1940s the phrase "Color by Technicolor" in a film's marketing campaign could boost ticket sales as much as 30%. But in the '50s, Eastman Kodak Co. (EK ) introduced a less expensive film stock that could run through any camera. That forced Technicolor into the business of processing film and manufacturing prints.

This month marks the anniversary of the Technicolor-Kinepolis announcement and to date only some 30-odd screens in Kinepolis' chain have been converted and no VPF deal has been announced for Europe. It is too soon to write off this deal, but it does illustrate the hurdles that European digital cinema business plans still face.

'Grease' director goes 3D for mobile phones

2007-06-28T17:57:00.000+01:00

'Nightmare Before Christmas' took the honour of first re-rendered 2D-into-3D away from 'Grease', which appears stuck in the Dimensionalization(tm) equivalent of development hell. Yet the director behind the film, Randall Kleiser, appears to have caught the stereoscopic bug (along with Lucas, Cameron and half of Hollywood). The Hollywood Reporter has a story that he and his business partner have patented a technology for stereoscopic display in electronic screens:

Director Randal Kleiser and inventor Michael Mehrle are introducing a technology designed to enable the viewing of 3-D content on such mobile devices as PDAs and iPods without the use of special glasses.

Their startup, Neovision Labs, has developed this unique technology called iFusion, which is patent pending.

In addition to offering a new capability to consumers, Kleiser, whose credits include "Grease" and "Honey I Blew Up the Kid," and Mehrle believe this unique technology has the potential to help forward the 3-D movement by giving the studios a venue in which to repurpose their 3-D-produced content after its theatrical release.

It is not aimed at cinemas, but they are already going digital 3D anyway, but for the great market beyond:

The attachment would be secured over the device screen. Mehrle said the attachment would be marketed as an accessory for hand-held devices and would list for about $50.

This technology does not convert a 2-D film to 3-D; rather, consumers would download 3-D content to the device for viewing. The content could be animated or live-action films produced in 3-D or films that were produced in 2-D and later converted to 3-D (like "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas"). In addition to features, 3-D shorts, 3-D special-venue films and other such content could be used with the system.

The content has to be specially encoded for this application. "Basically, it's zero added costs. You can do it on a laptop," Mehrle said.

Kleiser said he hopes this development would help grow 3-D production. As a director, he is excited about the possibilities that 3-D offers to filmmakers. "The director wants to make the audience feel visually like part of the story; that's what 3-D does," Kleiser said. "Directors have another tool that they can use for dramatic emphasis. (Images) could come out of the screen into their faces, the way we would use a close-up."

Let's see if 'Grease' in digital 3D comes to a cell phone near you any time soon.

Fithian slams Arts Alliance's VPF plan

2007-06-24T20:44:00.000+01:00

No one goes to the ICTA seminar expecting fireworks, but that's what we got this Sunday morning.

The normally sedate technology seminar tried something different when it invited the heads of NATO and UNIC. Having first talked about windows and piracy (sorry, 'movie theft'), we soon got on to everyone's favourite topic - digital cinema.

Without mentioning Arts Alliance Media by name - he is much to smart for that - John Fithian slammed the VPF business plan that was set to be unveiled the following day by AAM. I don't know if he had heard them trailer the announcement at the RAAM conference the previous week but he didn't need to as the details were all over the trades. Here is what the Hollywood Report wrote:

"At CineExpo we will be announcing that we have a VPF deal for Europe," AAM's Fiona Deans told delegates at the RAAM Digital Cinema conference in London on Thursday. "It might not be what everyone wants, but we think it is a fantastic opportunity for cinemas to digitize with distributors contributing."

It certainly wasn't what Fithian wanted to hear. Here is what he said at the ICTA event.

"Just because someone announces a deal with a couple of studios for a handful of territories doesn't make it right and doesn't mean it is happening."

He went on to characterized it as an 'attempt to fragment the market' and even called it 'bullshit' (yes, really).

What he must have particularly objected to was the following bit from AAM:

In a bid to encourage early adoption, Deans warned that the VPF deal wasn't "for an unlimited number of screens."

"We have a fixed number of screens that we can roll out to," she said. "And once those screens are signed up, we will have to go back to the studios and see whether they want to keep contributing at that level. This is obviously an incentive for people to start talking to us sooner rather than later."

Fithian was not swayed by this argument, calling for exhibitors to 'look at the fundamental economics of the deal.' He drove home the point by saying that "third-party integrators who go around and threaten to 'come and get it now because it will run out soon' have flawed economics." His words, not mine.

Fiona may just be echoing what some studios have been saying but it is not impressing the most important representative of the cinema industry. And what NATO believes, UNIC and European exhibitors are not likely to argue with it. Let's not forget that it was Fithian who helped kill off the premature original Technicolor digital cinema plan (PDF) in 2001.

It will be interesting to see how AAM will respon to this at tomorrow's Cinema Expo panel. I for one am expecting more fireworks.

China makes real on its digital cinema promise

2007-06-01T17:12:00.000+01:00

I've always joked that the easiest way to make digital cinema happen is if you can write it into your Five Year Plan ('Comrades, a digital cinema within bicycling distance for every farmer, worker and soldier!' as Mao might have said). And for a while China was at the forefront with digital cinema through the government-led 100 digital screen test network.

Unfortunately the timing was such that the deployment that started in 2002 took place in the middle of the 1.3K to 2K transition and the growth stalled after the first 100. In the last year, however, there are renewed sign that China might once again take a Great Digital Cinema Leap Forward. The latest piece of news is that China Film Group and the somewhat unlikely partner Shougang Steel are to build 2,000 digital screens. This is what the Hollywood Reporter had to report on it:

Dubbed China Film Group & Shougang Digital Cinema Building Co. Ltd., the joint venture, first unveiled to local media last week, believes the use of digital cinema technology will help stem some of China's rampant movie piracy problem.

Last year, about 93% of the discs sold in China were illegal copies, costing moviemakers upward of $2.6 billion in lost ticket sales, according to MPA estimates.

"The goal of our cooperation is to build digital cinemas across the country," Han Sanping, CFGC's board chairman told the official Xinhua news agency. "We will build about 2,000 new digital screens before the end of 2008."

But it looks like the construction might stop before it's even began due to the fact that a construction ban kicks in ahead of the Beijing 2008 Olympics. But it is a much needed growth for the exhibition sector in China. From the same article:

China now has about 3,000 modern movie screens, only 124 of which were digital in 2005, according to a recent report from the Nielsen Co. and Screen Digest. The number of digital screens in China rose from just 93 in 2004, with growth led by China Film, with 91 digital screens, and Stellar Film, with 27.

China Film's digital screens account for roughly half of their total 180 screens, a total that makes it the second-largest distributor in the country after Shanghai United Cinema Circuit, the report said.

What will they show on the digital screens? Well, in other Chinese digital cinema news ScreenDaily reports that Shrek 3 will get a digital-only release on 150 screens in China, which means that Hollywood titles are starting to return in digital after the studios put a halt to digital screenings, again because of piracy issues.

See 4K for yourself at Los Angeles' Landmark Westside Pavilion

2007-06-01T16:31:00.000+01:00

Marc Cuban's Landmark cinemas gave Sony cause for concearn a year and a half ago when they announced at CES that they had chosen DLP Cinema projectors as the preferred technology, having previously sworn by 4K. They later said that they were still committed to 4K and that committment has been proven with the opening of their new showcase cinema in Los Angeles.

This is what the Hollywood Reporter had to say about it:

The debut of Landmark Theatres' new flagship complex called the Landmark, which opens Friday at Los Angeles' Westside Pavilion, prompts a closer examination of 4K resolution digital cinema, which represents four times the picture information found in today's commonly used 2K digital cinema resolution.

The Landmark opens with three theaters equipped with Sony's SXRD 4K digital cinema projectors. These -- and one at the Landmark-owned NuArt -- represent the only screens in Los Angeles that offer 4K projection for paying audiences.

Landmark already has ordered about 25 4K projectors from Sony, which is the only manufacturer offering 4K digital cinema projectors to theater owners. In addition to Los Angeles, there are installations in Landmark theaters in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Indianapolis, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington. Plans are to also install 4K technology in Baltimore and Denver.

They make a lot about the audience being given the chance to see the 4K quality for themselves, though at present this seems confined to a few trailers and special footage from Sony Pictures, while they wait for films shot using the new 4K cameras. But read to the end of the article and you discover that "The Landmark opens with a total of 12 auditoriums, three with 4K projection, three with Panasonic 2K digital cinema projectors and all 12 with film projectors. "

Never mind that Panasonic don't make 2K projectors in the commonly accepted sense of the word (2048x1080 DLP Cinema chips, as opposed to 1920x1080 standard DLP), it's 35mm that still rules the day. In the meantime, Landmark is having an open relationship with Sony and TI.

Kuwait - latest country to be "first" to switch to digital cinema

2007-06-01T15:53:00.000+01:00

The list of countries planning to be 'first' to switch over all of its cinemas to digital is growing. Kuwait now joins the ranks of Ireland, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Norway in this non-Olympic competition sport. This is what an article Kuwait on the cusp of a D-cinema revolution from ArabianBusiness.com has to say:

Kuwait is set to become the first country in the world to boast an all-digital cinema (D-cinema) network, under an auspicious plan by the country's dominant cinema chain, Kuwait National Cinema Company (KNCC).

KNCC, which operates the Cinescape chain in Kuwait, recently contracted Indian company Real Image Media Technologies (RIMT) to develop a pilot D-cinema project installed in its flagship Kuwait City cinema multiplex. The project involved the installation of Real Image's Qube high definition XP-D DCI compliant digital cinema server and a Cinemeccanica 2K digital projector.

I'm not sure what they mean with statements like that the installation "surpasses the 2K quality standard agreed upon by the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI)." (Do they mean 4K? I don't think so.) The article is right, however, that Kuwait like much of the Middle East is a unique market in that it has films from Hollywood, India (Bollywood) and Arabic Countries. As such, the deal is a coup for RIMT.

However, I'm less sure of the 'first country' thing. For a starter, I'd be tempted to take a handful of 2K projectors to Andorra claim to have switched over an entire country to digital. Kuwait, Singapore and Luxembourg are independent states, but they are also those odd questions in Trivial Pursuit's Geography category. The article itself tells the full story of the numbers, in that "KNCC plans to digitise 40 existing cinema screens and establish a further 50 digital theatres across Kuwait over the next 12 months." For it to count I'd say you need to get up to at least 100 for it to count.

So it's still a race between Ireland or Norway - and my money is firmly on Norway being first.

Pirates 3 tops Spider-Man 3 as widest digital release

2007-05-22T11:25:00.000+01:00

My friends and colleagues at Deluxe were as always too modest to shout that the digital cinema release of 'Spider-Man 3' was the largest ever, hitting over a thousand digital screens across the world. That record was, however, short lived, as 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End' looks set to go even larger. This from a press release from an article in the Hollywood Reporter:

"At World's End" will be the first feature to be released on more than 1,000 digital cinema screens domestically and will be the first movie to bow on more than 400 screens internationally, Buena Vista Pictures domestic distribution president Chuck Viane said.

As of Monday, "Pirates" was set to open on 1,064 digital cinema screens domestically and an additional 410 internationally. Viane said the number could rise before this weekend's release.

"It went up 20-something (screens) in the last few hours," he said.

There are 3,229 domestic digital screens. Precise international figures weren't immediately available, but the pace of digital installations in the U.S. and abroad has quickened dramatically during the past 18 months amid major rollout financing.

What with 'Spider-Man 3' still playing in plenty of screens and 'Shrek 3' also occupying its fair share, this record is all the more impressive.

Why the smallest cinemas matter

2007-05-09T17:38:00.000+01:00

I spent the past weekend attending the annual get together of Våra Gårdar, whose 70-odd cinemas account for just one per cent of Sweden's box office and is run by the temperance movement, in Leksand, Dalarna. Was a mad, desperate or starved of sights of the Swedish countryside to be attending an event like this. None of the above.

At the moment the battle is on for how to finance the digitisation of the largest cinema chains in Europe. An old friend joked about how in the next few months the eager European third
party integrators will step off a plan from LAX, waving the VPF (virtual print fee) document above their head and proclaiming 'Digital Cinema in our time!' But the trick is not how to make a deal with the Hollywood studios but how to make a deal on the local level, most importantly of all, one that takes account of all cinemas, large and small.

I joked a while back about the need to launch a 'No Cinema Left Behind' plan for digital, which has been taken up in the US when J. Wayne Anderson was elected MD of the Cinema Buying Group, L.L.C. (CBG). But so far that has not been headed. Sadly there does not seem any concerted effort to do this, either at a national or pan-European level. Instead we still get the occasional misguided call for 'European' digital cinema standards (whatever those are).

The truth is that those that best understand how to save the small cinemas are the people who run the small cinemas themselves. It was these people that I had the privilege to meet, talk to and get to know in Leksand, which also happens to have one of the most beautiful cinemas in the whole country (sorry, no picture). Despite the town just having 5,000 citizens, gets first run films such as Spider-Man 3 and Pirates 3. The team from Fox Sweden were even there to hand out donuts from the Simpsons Movie mobile. And as further recognition of the big-small importance of the event, also attending was Sweden's Minister of Culture, the head of Swedish Television, and the new head of the audience department for the Swedish Film Institute. I won't go into detail about everything that was said, including an off-the-record lunch with the Minister, but I think Sweden has the ability to tackle this issue head on. The answer is not just to try to throw money at the problem.

As a bonus on the trip I also got to visit the only Scandinavian cinema museum, located two hours outside the capital Stockholm but well worth the trip. Have a look for yourself at Biografmuseet, even if it is in Swedish and fall in love with the very idea of cinemas and realise why it is worth saving in the digital age.

Dolby's server good enough for FIPS

2007-04-27T16:31:00.000+01:00

With MPEG-2 soon a distant memory for Hollywood-quality digital cinema servers, the next big hump is FIPS compliance. The magic number to learn is 140-2 and servers that have Level 3 validation will soon be the only ones good enough to play Hollywood content. Dolby is one of the first manufacturers to claim to have achieved recommendation for it, according to their press release:

InfoGard Laboratories, an accredited Cryptographic Module Testing Laboratory under Lab Code 100432-0 of the National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program, submitted the recommendation for the Dolby Digital Cinema server to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validation, as outlined by the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) specifications.

Through this achievement, Dolby Digital Cinema has moved further toward comprehensive DCI compatibility.

...

Achieving FIPS Level 3 compliance would mean that the Dolby Digital Cinema server meets the highest level of protection required by DCI to prevent thieves and hackers from accessing the "master-quality" motion picture files used in digital cinema systems. FIPS are security standards developed by the NIST and cover detailed specifications for physical and mechanical design, electronic circuitry, software, interfaces, and algorithms.

Though they have not put out a dedicated press release about it, Sony have achieved this too. At their presentation earlier this week, they told the brave souls that stayed for the in-depth techy talk just what the testing involved. Amongst other things the testers would insert inflatable balloons that would then be expanded so that the casing is dented enough to insert a hand, finger or instruments. It would seem that both Dolby and Sony are thus balloon-safe.

Bill Mead gives d-cinema global overview

2007-04-27T16:15:00.000+01:00

For those of you that missed Bill Mead of DCinemaToday fame give his presentation of the state of digital cinema around the world at ShoWest, now is your chance to catch up. An article published in Film Journal International gives a condensed version of the talk. It is worth quoting the first few paragraphs:

By this spring, approximately 3,000, or three percent, of the world's estimated target screens (100,000-plus) will have been equipped with DCI-specified digital projectors and servers. Of the early adopters, approximately two-thirds are in North America, with the rest spilt between Europe and Asia. Significantly, most of the installation occurred in the past 12 months, making 2006 stand out as the pivotal year in the digital conversion timeframe.

Almost 50% of the world's d-cinema installed base can be attributed to one organization, Carmike Cinemas of Columbus GA, who early in 2006 made the extraordinary commitment to equip all of its 2,300 screens with digital projection. Working with Christie/AIX, North America's leading d-cinema systems provider, Carmike has already converted over 1,350 auditoriums to digital. Christie/AIX is a partnership formed in June 2005 between projector manufacturer Christie Digital and d-cinema business provider AccessIT of Morristown, New Jersey.

The United States had an astounding growth in 2006 of over 400%, from just over 500 to over 2,000 installations by year's end. The rapid pace was driven by the maturing and acceptance of digital conversion plans, the convergence of various proprietary formats into the soon-to-be-ubiquitous DCI JPEG2000 MXF format, and an ample supply of U.S. digital titles. By mid-year 2006, virtually all Hollywood studios were making their major "tentpole" titles available in the DCI format, with over 100 titles distributed in the U.S. in 2006.

It gives the facts straight and without editorialising, plus you don't have to put up with the non-working A/C system that those of us who sat through the one hour presentation had to suffer. But it was well worth it.

Sony shows off its new 4K projector

2007-04-26T17:47:00.000+01:00

Sony has taken the wraps of the latest generation of 4K SXRD projectors and invited the whole world to come and see it. Well, maybe not the whole world, but it seemed like most of the key cinema moves and shakers came to London for the two one-day events.

Once again the event was held at the Odeon Leicester Square, but unlike the previous time Sony demoed the 4K there, this time it went much smoother. It's no secret that Sony has had a bit of a management shake up for its digital cinema business in Europe recently, but it seems like things are paying off with a good product and a clearer strategy.

There was a lot of press coverage about the event, though for all those of you that cannot read the Norwegian article, you will have to make do with the IDG/PC World write up:

The projector, which was used earlier this month to project the "Spiderman 3" movie at its world premiere in Tokyo, is a giant. It stands more than 1.5 meters high, is 1.4 meters deep and 74 centimeters wide and weighs 300 grams.

At its heart sits a 4.2kW bulb (an average household bulb is about 60W) and light from here is bounced off mirrors and through a prism to be split into red, green and blue streams. Each of these goes through a 1.55-inch flat-panel display based on Sony's SXRD (Silicon Crystal Display) technology before being combined and magnified through a lens as wide as a man's hand.

The result, as Sony demonstrated on Wednesday, is a spectacular image that's a rank above what you might be used to seeing at the movies. The projector outputs an image with 4,096 pixels by 2,160 pixels resolution, which is double that of HDTV both horizontally and vertically to result in more than 8 million pixels versus about 2 million on HDTV.

So far, so pedestrian and unspectacular. But the image that it put up on Britain's largest cinema screen looked very good. You will have noticed that the shape has changed too. Gone is what I though looked like a hulking giant black cyclopic toad and now we have something that more closely resembles 35mm and DLP Cinema projectors - if only it was a little less wide to fit more easily through the doorway of the average projection booth. It has been recommended for FIPS certification (as I discussed in the Dolby article).

What is equally impressive is the business side. Sony seem to 'get it' more than they did even 12 months ago. The pricing of the projector is reasonable at 75,000 euro (sans lens) and they are even hinting at a financing vehicle to help pay for it.

But some things remain frustratingly unchanged. The article says that "Sony launched its first 4K digital cinema projector two years ago, but it's only in use in four of Japan's roughly 3,000 cinema screens, the company said." That ignores the 11 4K SXRD projectors that have been sold in Norway - MORE THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD (including Sony's native Japan) - of which four are in cinemas or screening rooms, i.e. as many as Japan. Do not ignore your biggest customer, however small, or risk driving them into the arms of the competition.

But, like I said, overall it was an impressive presentation and while there are issues to be resolved with the projector technically and the organisation around it, at least it shows that Sony are heading in the right direction.

Digital cinema comes to Kuwait

2007-04-25T18:38:00.000+01:00

Kuwait looks set to be the first Arabic cinema to install a 2K digital cinema system, though Isreal beat them to it in the Middle East region. According to the press release this could shortly be followed by a complete conversion of the participating exhibitors entire cinema network:

Kuwait National Cinema Company (KNCC), one of the largest theatrical exhibition companies in the Middle East, the Chennai-based Qube Cinema, Inc. and Cinemeccanica Theatrical Equipment Co.,(Italy) have partnered to bring the first digital cinema to the Middle East and Gulf Region. A pilot DCI quality digital cinema is under installation in KNCC's theatre (Cinescape) in Kuwait City using a Qube XP-D DCI Compliant digital cinema server and a Cinemeccanica 2K digital projector.

This pilot phase will, if successful, be followed by a complete digitisation of KNCC's screens all over Kuwait and upcoming cinemas in Gulf States, i.e. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar. KNCC and Qube Cinema also plan to setup a digital cinema mastering unit in the region to convert Arabic content to DCI compliant Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs).

Interesting to note that it is Qube supplying the server. Although they haven't made a great fanfare about it, GDC Technology supplied the first digital cinema server to Africa (Kenya, if memoriy serves me correctly) and the likes of Qube and GDC could come to dominate 2K/DCI deployments in developing nations, given their lower costs and better understanding of these markets.

Disney goes very big with Robinsons

2007-04-18T12:25:00.000+01:00

Thomson has put out a press release trumpeting just how wide the have released the digital 2D and 3D version of Walt Disney's Meet the Robinsons. This is how many:

Technicolor digitally mastered and distributed Meet the Robinsons for 892 screens worldwide. Domestically, the feature was distributed to 582 screens in Disney Digital 3-D (TM) and 138 screens in digital 2-D. The feature was distributed internationally to 105 screens in 3D and 67 screens in 2D. In addition, Technicolor created all traditional 35mm film prints for the release.
"Thomson is very pleased to have participated with Walt Disney Pictures to the widest digital cinema release to date," said Curt Behlmer, executive vice president of Technicolor Theatrical Services and COO of Technicolor Digital Cinema.

I beleive that the previous record was held by SPE's Casino Royal, done by Deluxe, even though it only went out in 2D and had a limited international play. It is interesting to note how few screens showed it in 2D, with digital 3D ones outnumbering them 4-1. This means that digital 3D will soon be the ONLY way to release (computer) animated films and that children will compain if they get taken to a 2D rather than 3D showing.

I'm reminded of the friend's daughter who complained that the television set upstairs was broken because she could not pause it. Digital changes expectations and consumption preferences.

Getting national(istic) about digital cinema

2007-04-17T10:41:00.000+01:00

Even those of us ho did not attend NAB2007 and the Digital Cinema Summit could not fail to notice that Germany has been profiling itself particularly prominently this year. The Germans have been part of the digital cinema scene for a while, particularly in recent months through the work of Fraunhofer, but this is the largest concerted effort yet to group it all together under one banner. There was even a press release issued about it:

Under the heading "D-Cinema and Beyond," the full digital-cinema process chain was presented to the professional public. The event was realised by "Invest in Germany - Land of Ideas" a common project of the initiative "Germany - Land of Ideas" and the federal investment promotion agency "Invest in Germany". The presentation centred on the 5k Multi-Projection technology developed for digital cinema by the Fraunhofer Society's Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) in Berlin.

Source: Germany - Land of Ideas

·	(Graphic: Business Wire). View Multimedia Gallery

Apart from the Fraunhofer Institutes in Berlin and Erlangen, the cooperation partners also include the camera manufacturer ARRI, T-Systems' Media&Broadcast arm as a service provider to the media and broadcast industry, and the software and hardware manufacturer DVS.

It reminded me of the effort last autumn to bring together various French digital cinema interests under the ISA banner, particularly for the screening of the 4K mastered 'Paris Je Taim' at the ETC (link to PDF), which united CN films, CST, Doremi, Eclair Digital Cinema, Open Cube, SmartJog and Thomson Content Security (but not Technicolor). And the first one ever was ofcourse the UK's Department of Trade and Industry that united Britain's various manufacturers and interest parties through the Electronic Film Group. Italy has also attempted this type of thing, but on a much smaller scale (primarily Elsacom and Marina Studios) and I guess it would be possible to include Japan's original T-Joy consortium under this banner too.

Do such groupings work? The track record seems to be that they can raise awareness in the short term and pull off individual demonstrations and events, but work less well for establishing a long term united business. Ironically, digital cinema is too small to depend on all the businesses in one country being a perfect match. The ideal grouping is often an international effort with servers, projectors, and software coming from different countries. The countries that have done best were those that had a strong government drive to push together hardware partners with the cinemas, something that appears neglected in groupings such as those of France and Germany.

Countries that did well in this early on were China and Singapore. Today the crown is carried by Norway, thanks to the D-Cinema Alliance that has managed to get all stakeholders around the table to thrash out a roadmap for the all-digital future. Just don't expect them to sponsor a breakfast or coctails in Las Vegas.

DCI announces digital 3D specs and certifier

2007-04-16T09:50:00.000+01:00

At the second day of the digital cinema summit held at NAB 2007 two major announcements were made by DCI. The first was that there was agreement on a single distribution format for digital stereoscopic films. This is what Variety had to report on it:

The DCI, a joint venture of the studios, did not originally anticipate the 3-D boom that has grown out of digital cinema and was silent on 3-D technical specifications. As a result, incompatible 3-D systems have proliferated.
Studios releasing a film in 3-D have since had to create as many as seven different 3-D digital cinema "packages."
Digital cinema consultant David Reisner said that Sunday's announcement, which is a one-page addendum to the DCI specs, would put the business on notice that there should be "only one format for distribution, not multiple formats for distribution."
Which format wins out, though, remains to be seen.

DCI also announced that Cinecert had been selected as the first testing company for so-called DCI compliance. More from Variety:

The selection of Cinecert as DCI's testing company moves the industry a step closer to answering one of the major questions remaining for d-cinema: Who will decide whether a product can be called "DCI-compliant"?
The question is vital to manufacturers, because there is little market for non-DCI-compliant d-cinema hardware, and exhibitors need assurances their expensive d-cinema hardware will work as advertised.
DCI had contracted with a German research institute, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, to develop tests for DCI compliance. Cinecert has a six-month contract to complete the work Fraunhofer started and to develop a set of testing procedures and standard tests. Once Cinecert has finished, DCI will choose testing entities.

In other announcements, DCI has published a list of errata corrections to the original specification and Sony and Warner Bros will take over technical and management responsibility from Paramount and Universal, so expect Al Barton to have even less free time than he already has from October onwards.

At the same event, WB's CTO Chris Cookson gave what sounds like an excellent keynote advocating a baseline capture of 4K for archives.

More digital 3D news and developments

2007-04-05T11:38:00.000+01:00

The release of Meet the Robinsons seems to have triggered a minor avalanche of digital 3D news, analysis and pontifications. Here are some of the recent items. Rick Munarritz at MotleyFool written a good article highlighting the 'duel' between IMAX and Disney - or rather large format Hollywood releases and digital 3D Hollywood releases - in providing an enhanced cinema goer experience. Not to spoil the ending of the article but Disney/digital 3D emerges the winner:

Take the recent success of Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) 300, for instance. The movie opened in 62 domestic IMAX theaters just as it hit your local multiplex. The stylized chronicle of Spartan combat grossed $70.9 million at the box office during its opening weekend on 3,103 screens, and $3.6 million of that came from 300: The IMAX Experience. The average conventional theater took in an impressive average of $22,000 over the weekend, yet the IMAX locations averaged a record $58,000 per screen.

The crowds kept coming. A weekend later, IMAX was accounting for a worldwide $9.1 million of the cumulative $154.2 million that 300 had generated. You're sitting pretty if you're producing 6% of the ticket sales on just 2% of the screens.

Yes, IMAX setups are a little larger. The company's MPX system, being tested by theater chains, takes up the space of two retrofitted screens. The transformation process doesn't come cheap, but the 300 math still works in its favor. Triple the ticket sales for double the space? An event-driven crowd that will be quicker to pay up for pricey concessions to make the most of the experience? That adds up for me.

However, let's check back in on our good friend Lewis. The $7.1 million in ticket sales generated by the digital 3-D version breaks down to just $12,220 per screen, but that's still 2.6 times more than the film drew from the traditional screens.

Disney has now given Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons the digital 3-D treatment with welcome results. Can you imagine how sweet it will be with a bigger Pixar flick? Meet the Robinsons in 3-D accounted for 28% of the film's opening-weekend gross, in just 17% of the theaters. Disney isn't going to shy away, especially since movie chains are making the digital migration anyway.

According to my calculations, there are now more than twice as many digital cinema 3D-equipped screens world wide as there are large format/IMAX screens.

Disney will re-release the digital 3D version of The Nightmare Before Christmas this Halloween again. The only thing different about it is that it will include a 3D re-rendered version of Tim Burton's first short Vincent this time. Don't be surprised of SPE also re-release Monster House in time for Halloween as well. Christie claims that 67 per cent of digital cinema projectors used by Real D were manufactured by Christie, perhaps not surprising given that almost half of them (220 out of 460) are part of the Christie/AIX deployment. World wide Real D claims to have 680 installations. Another major cinema chain to have embraced Real D and digital 3D is National Amusements, which has the system installed in half of all its cinemas according to this press release:

Currently, National Amusements circuit features 24 locations with 25 screens and brings the total of National Amusements 3D 2K projection systems to 44 locations on 45 screens. The installations will be completed for the opening of Disney's animated feature film, MEET THE ROBINSONS in REAL D on March 30, 2007 and will bring over 50% of National's locations into the realm of Digital 3D, the highest percent of any major USA circuit.

"We are pleased to be able to bring the excitement of REAL D 3-D technology to an even larger number of our patrons, and just in time to enjoy this new Disney film," said Shari E. Redstone, President, National Amusements. "This great 3-D technology allows National Amusements to bring patrons a broader range of unique film and entertainment programming options such as live sports and concert performances, building on our goal to make our theatres a community entertainment destination."
The REAL D 3-D installations complement National Amusements efforts to bring state-of-the art digital cinema to their patrons. The company is participating in Technicolor Digital Cinema's beta test of state-of-the-art digital projection equipment in 14 National Amusements sites, reaching 120 screens in select locations. This will bring National's total Digital Cinema presentation capability to a total of 165 Screens in it's U.S. locations. They have also recently signed a multiyear agreement with Screenvision to install its digital pre-show system on more than 1,000 of National Amusements' domestic screens.

A brief history of films released in 3D (digital and analogue) is provided in the following article that looks at 'The Three Ages of 3D', of which this is the first:

The 1950s

Although the stereoscopic technology used in creating 3-D movies was invented in the late 1800s, with the first debuting in the early 1900s, the 1950s was the decade of ''in your face'' 3-D action. It was part of Hollywood's response to the advent of television.

Following the success of 1953's ''Bwana Devil,'' with its thrown spears and leaping lions assaulting the audience, Hollywood embraced the technology. Later that year came ''House of Wax,'' and in 1954 ''Creature From The Black Lagoon'' and Alfred Hitchcock's ''Dial M For Murder.''

During this time, audiences used the classic, flimsy cardboard glasses with the red-and-blue cellophane lenses.

However, like most it gets the early history wrong. These first films were not shown using anaglyph (red and blue filter) technology but using polarized glasses. This Wikipedia article has a much better grasp of history:

The "golden era" (1952-1955)

What aficionados consider the "golden era" of 3-D began in 1952 with the release of the first color stereoscopic feature, Bwana Devil, produced, written and directed by Arch Oboler. The film was shot in Natural Vision, a process that was co-created and controlled by M. L. Gunzberg. Gunzberg, who built the rig with his brother, Julian, and two other associates, shopped it without success to various studios before Oboler used it for this feature, which went into production with the title, The Lions of Gulu.[citation needed] The film stars Robert Stack, Barbara Britton and Nigel Bruce.

As with practically all of the features made during this boom, Bwana Devil was projected dual-strip, with Polaroid filters. During the 1950s, the familiar disposable anaglyph glasses made of cardboard were mainly used for comic books, two shorts by Dan Sonny Productions, and three shorts produced by Lippert Productions. One should note, however, that even the Lippert shorts were available in the dual-strip format alternatively.

Because the features utilized two projectors, a capacity limit of film being loaded onto each projector (about 6,000 feet) meant that an intermission was necessary for every movie. Quite often, intermission points were written into the script of the film at a major plot point.

And here is a lovely poster of Bwana Devil to remind you of what 3D films aren't like any more.

THR claims more than 4,000 D-Cinema installations WW

2007-04-04T18:34:00.000+01:00

Two major digital cinema milestones have been passed, according to Texas Instruments and The Hollywood Reporter. There are now more than 4,000 screens world wide converted to high-end digital, and 10 per cent of all screens in the US, since that is where the majority of the installs are.

According to the article this growth is being pushed recently by digital 3-D:

TI's figures are based on projectors using DLP technology. The TI chip is used in digital cinema projectors from Barco, Christie and NEC, and TI estimated that 99% of digital theaters rely on this technology.

"Meet the Robinsons" will play in 3-D on roughly 600 digital cinema screens domestically, and an additional 100 internationally. "There has been a 400% increase in 3-D screens using DLP Cinema projectors in the U.S. since Disney's 2006 release of "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D," said Nancy Fares, business manager for DLP Cinema Products Group. "Meet the Robinsons" will also be available in 2D on 122 digital cinema screens worldwide.

The burst of activity demonstrates some momentum in the transition, as the industry recorded 1,000 digital cinema screens in theaters about a year ago and reached 3,000 in early January.

If TI is right that 99 per cent of projectors deployed use the DLP Cinema chip, that means that there are around 40 Sony SXRD projectors from Sony in US, Norway and Japan.

But with a growth of about 400 projectors a month (most still for Christie/AIX) ad a projection of 5,000 screens this summer and 7,000 by the end of '07, Sony has some serious catching up to do.

Microspace-Carmike deal opens way for more movies over satellite in US

2007-04-04T15:15:00.000+01:00

Carmike Cinemas, who as you know is the largest client of Christie/AIX, has signed an independent delivery deal with Microspace. This seems to mean that in the future studios would not have to go through AccessIT to send their films to cinemas in digital over satellite. Instead their preferred service providers (Deluxe, Technicolor) could use Microspace directly. This is a very interesting development, as highlighted by the article 'Movies from Space!':

As part of a pilot program, Microspace will install satellite and server equipment in more than 200 Carmike theaters, making it possible for digital satellite transmissions to reach more than 2,000 screens, Microspace officials said. Neither Carmike nor Microspace would divulge the cost of the agreement.

The deal, reached on March 7, will enable Carmike, already the biggest user of digital technology in the movie theater business, to accept films from more Hollywood studios. Carmike entered the deal with Microspace because some studios have preferences as to which satellite delivery company they use, said Tony Reed, senior vice president at Carmike.

Carmike has had a deal in place with Access IT of Morristown, N.J., since March 2004, to receive digital transmissions of movies directly via satellite.

Of Carmike's 2,447 total screens in 289 theaters, 1,711 screens in 85 theaters are set up for digital, Reed said.

"Access IT, to date, has delivered films to Carmike theaters from Buena Vista, Universal and a couple of others," he said.

Microspace executives say their company has delivered 10 first-run films -- "Glory Road," "World Trade Center," "Dream Girls," "Over the Hedge," "Mission Impossible III," "Eight Below," "The Shaggy Dog," "She's the Man," "Flushed Away" and "Cars" -- to eight theater chains across the country. The movies played on more than 2,000 screens at some 250 locations, said Curt Tilly, manager of digital cinema distribution for Microspace.

Note that studios like Sony Pictures and Fox are absent from this list, but that might now start to change.

This is a great step forward for Microspace, which now looks set to become the pre-eminent digital cinema satellite service provider for North America.

India rips into Hollywood's d-cinema standards

2007-04-01T09:22:00.000+01:00

It's not often that you get an out-and-out assult on Hollywood standard-setting efforts for digital cinema. Mostly it is low key grumblings, punctured by the occasional inane idea of a 'French' or 'European' digital cinema standard. But it seems like the Indians, who have as much if not more experience in distributing films digitally to cinemas as Hollywood, have had it up to here according to this article in Variety:

Rajaa Kanwar, vice chairman of UFO Moviez and chairman of the Ficci (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) digital entertainment forum, described standards put together by the Digital Cinema Initiative's committee of Hollywood studios and vendors as "rigid, unrealistic" and "not appropriate" to many territories, including India.
Kanwar described a series of myths he ascribed to DCI and d-cinema systems that claim to be DCI compliant.
He said that theater chains do not generally invest in technology; that distributors are fragmented and not able to manage technology themselves; that interoperability is not a reality; and that the human eye is largely unable to detect the higher image quality delivered by DCI standards.
Kanwar said that the cost of a DCI -compliant d-cinema system is about $125,000; his company charges theaters as little as $4.60 per screening for 2K projection equipment.
UFO Moviez provides turnkey digital cinema systems that are typically leased or rented by multiplex operators. Antipiracy protection comes from satellite delivery of movies that requires no human intervention.
Company has e-cinema installations in 625 theaters in India and is selling its system in Singapore, Malaysia and Europe.
Bill Jasper Jr., prexy, director and CEO of Dolby Laboratories, admitted that he had not understood the DCI's decision to switch from MPEG to JPEG2000 standards for video compression. (JPEG2000 is a standard derived from technology for still images.)
He suggested problems ahead for the DCI as studios want to do away with the virtual print fee, which may be as high as $1,000, in a few years. But he said that 3-D cinema, made more possible by 4K DCI-compliant technology, was popular with auds and is an "effective antipiracy tool."

As Walt Ordway is always at pains to stress, a) DCI is not a 'standard' but a set of specifications, and b) it describes a baseline, but is open to expansions and extensions. Before you knock the Indians, remember that they are the only ones to have made e-cinema possible on a big scale without needing Hollywoods virtual print fee (VPF) solution. I'm also surprised that Jasper should not have understood the switch from MPEG to JPEG (even though he worked for an audio company at the time) and I'm sure that he is misquoted in linking digital 3D and 4K.

ShoWest review - digital 3D goes mainstream

2007-03-27T10:25:00.000+01:00

It is difficult to tackle the ShoWest cinema trade show in Las Vegas earlier this month in one review, so I'm breaking it down into a few sections.

The most obvious one to start with is digitial stereoscopic cinema, or digital 3D, as this was by far the biggest topic. By now, pretty much everyone has woken up to the fact that digital 3D is the only visible differentiator that digital cinema has over 35mm film. This despite the fact that I attended my first digital 3D demo at ShoWest 2004, i.e. three years ago, albeit of a prototype set-up in a hotel room in Flamingo. What is perhaps most remarkable is how long it took Texas Instruments, maker of the DLP Cinema chip and hence keepers of the digital cinema flame, to wake up to this USP of their technology. Now even Sony are trying to get in on it with their SXRD projectors. But more about that in a minute.

We've only had three digital 3D features to day: Chicken Little, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Monster House and as any of the studio technologists who had worked on either will tell you, there were heaps of problems to be overcome, not least in creating the 8-12 versions that had to be sent out (that's DCPs, not local language versions). But now we have Disney's Meet the Robinsons out and playing in digital 3D in over 600 locations, so we have reached the tipping point where digital 3D crosses over into the mass market. This article from the Detroit Free Press confirms this:

There are only about 600 theaters whose owners have been convinced that the new 3-D is not a fad or a gimmick, useful only for making an audience duck when baseballs or other objects seem to be hurled from the screen.
But if "Meet the Robinsons" is a success, more theater owners will be induced to buy the necessary projection equipment. (At present, theater owners want the studios to foot the bill, just as they do with basic digital projection.)
What it will take to bring about this change is the release of a blockbuster exclusively in 3-D digital. (Most theaters will show "Meet the Robinsons" in the flat, two-dimensional version). And that is exactly what is promised in 2009, when "Titanic" director James Cameron releases the live-action sci-fi fantasy-adventure "Avatar."
The hype and hoopla around "Avatar" is certain to be on a "Star Wars" level, which will mean every theater chain will want to have it on three or four screens. And once that technology is in place, more filmmakers will embrace it, first for animated films and action-driven spectacle -- as in "Mission: Impossible IV: 3-D" or the resurrection of the "Star Trek" franchise -- and then, as we adjust to and expect it, for everything that comes after.

At the pre-ShoWest meeting of EDCF Bob Kisor of Paramount predicted that by 2009 there would be enough digital 3D films out to keep at least one screen in a multiplex occupied full time with nothing but 3D films. Paramount will be the third studio to release a digital 3D title when Beowulf comes out later this year, by which time there will be over 1,000 screens equipped to show it in digital 3D. The Financial Times has a good, if not too deep, summary of the situation in an its article 'Hollywood sees its box office future in 3D revival'. A further note of optimism was injected by Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks Animation, who are going into CGI digital 3D in the near future, according to the article in Hollywood Reporter:

Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, which is readying two 3-D films for 2009, predicted that moviegoers will some day own their own glasses for 3-D viewing much like they own sunglasses today.

He said that moviegoers will gladly pay up to a 50% premium to watch 3-D films in a theater and that such a scenario will make the debate over collapsing distribution windows largely irrelevant. He noted that the exhibition industry hasn't used variable pricing strategies to boost it fortunes nearly to the extent that other industries have.

And one more added benefit: 3-D movies can't be easily pirated.

He also added some interesting news./gossip, such as the Pixar and Disney were considering releasing Toy Story 3 in digital 3D and that given enough screens, Dreamwork's 2009 title Monsters vs Aliens would only be released in digital 3D in cinemas and 2D would be saved for the DVD.

So what did we actually see at ShoWest? There were three major digital 3D events. The company that is behind most of the installations in the US and around the world, Real D, showed clips from films (the Robinson trailer). But as the Thursday event was billed as 'Hollywood and Beyond' they also went into some ODS (other digital stuff), primarily the two documentaries that they will be releasing with National Geographics, so expect lions and sea monsters in digital 3D at your local multiplex. More interestingly we were shown clips from the U2 concert in 3D. It was impressive, but to truly have been blown away I would have want to have seen it live.

The live digital 3D was the promise of the other major event, supported by Sony and post-poned a day after 'electrical' problems, “3-D and Alternative Content – Not Just for Movies Anymore”:

Presented by Sony Electronics
Alternative content for your digital theater moves to the next level with live events in 3-D. As demonstrated during the NBA All-Star Game weekend, sporting and concert events captured - live - by 3D Digital Camera Systems and exhibited - live - in 3D provide a new and more compelling theater experience. Game enthusiasts competing together in multiple HD windows on a single 4K projector can provide a way to monetize off-hours in your theater. A panel of Industry Experts will discuss the moneymaking implications of these new content avenues. Examples of gaming content and 3D "live" sports content will be exhibited during the session.

Sony caught some flack for pulling of this demo by stacking two SXRD 4K projectors, something that no-one is likely to be doing in their projection booth. I have less of a problem with this, as I'm sure that the technology will be good enough to be doing it with one projector within a couple of years. Also, the event was not about the Sony projector but about the ODS potential of digital 3D, as demonstrated by the 3ality production. Yet, there was a 'us-too' aspect to it in the fact that Sony does not want to be seen to be left behind in the rush to digital 3D.

Seeing the NBA basketball game in digital 3D was a revelation, even for an anti-sports person like myself, because it proved the valibity of the less-is-more adage. In this case it proved that less close ups, fast cuts, fast pans and zooms and general camera trickery, made for a more involving experience. The cinema screen is not your television at home and it is large enough for the audience to look where they want and let the eye follow the ball, rather than the camera. The whole event was captured with just six cameras and I didn't feel it needed any more. Plus, both Wayne Newton, Christina Aguillera and the cheerleeders looked great in digital 3D.

The third and last event was an invitation only demo in the Dolby room, where the company gave a preview of the new technology for displaying digital 3D that they are still working on in their lab. While it is far form ready for prime time, it has advanced much foruther than I thought it had. Put briefly, it combines the advantages of using cheap plastic glasses with not having to put in place a silver screen but keeping your normal old and dirty single-gain perf screen.

The clips were unimportant (Spy Kids 3-D and IMAX documentary Bugs), the techonlogy interesting (a spinning colour wheel between the lamp and the DLP Cinema chips that could allow for higher light output), but the business model was a killer. Unlike Real D, Dolby will not tie you in to a long-term licence fee. You buy the 3D-enabled digital cinema server and that's it. Other than the glasses, which will be cheap, there are no recurring fees. This is a return to the traditional Dolby business model of selling boxes and making money on mastering services.

I will return to this issue in the next ShoWest summary in discussing the technology and particularly why the server future belongs to Dolby, Doremi and Qube.

What keeps John Fithian awake at night

2007-03-25T23:18:00.000+01:00

I found out the answer to the above question in a chat I had with John, the head of the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO - yes, but without the nukes), a few years ago. No, it was not digital cinema, nor film piracy/theft and not even Al Quaida targeting your local multiplex (but, yes they had one scare). It was the aging cinema population.

At this year the message from both Fithian and MPAA's Glickman was upbeat: 2006 had been better than 2005, box office takings had gone up, the summer was full of sequels that would drive the hoards back to the popcorn tills, the death of cinema was greatly exaggerated. What no one mentioned was that attendance in 2006 was DOWN on 2007, it's just ticket price inflation that grew the box office. And when I talked to cinema owners, they were more downbeat about the prospects beyond Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, Pirates 3, etc. Kids just aren't going to the cinemas. It's not cool. Not like mobiles or MySpace.

What to do in this scenario? Embrace the oldies, that's what. At least, that's the message in a perceptive article from the Friday's Film section of the UK's The Guardian newspaper, by the very knowledgeable Geoffrey Macnab (he also writes for Time Out and helps program the National Film Theatre in London). Here is what he has to say:

The older audience is already the fastest growing sector in the market: recent research suggested that close to 60% of those clamouring to see Stephen Frears' The Queen were 55 or over - "77% female, mean age 59" is the official breakdown of the audience. Tellingly, only 1% of the film's audience were 18 and 19-year-olds and, if the statistics are to be believed, not a single per cent were 15 and 16-year-olds.

Films like Mrs Henderson Presents (audience: 62% female, mean age 59), The History Boys (57% male, mean age 51), Gosford Park, Calendar Girls, Ladies In Lavender and Miss Potter have also successfully attracted the older cinemagoer. "Five years ago, 38% of the cinema audience was 35 or over, whereas last year it was 46%," says Film Distributors' Association chief executive Mark Batey.

This is the audience that the digital cinema of the future will have to cater to. [Notice also that these films are cheaper to make and therefor have a better chance of a good return-on-investment ratio]. I myself do not think that cinema will ever die, but I fear that it is in danger of becoming jazz. That is, appreciated only by a small number of people in vanishingly marginal elite venues and too often looking back rather than innovating.

The fact that the future belongs to the old timers has already been spotted by the particularly clever exhibitors, such as Vue's Tim Richards. Yes, he is quoted in the article, but he has made these observations earlier too. I had a chance to speak to him briefly at both the BSAC conference before ShoWest and in Vegas. Vue may not have been first or even second to set up an all-digital multiplex in the UK, but when they do I bet that they will have the most innovative programming when it comes ot catering to the widest possible age bracket.