HD For Indies

Three Studios Join Technicolor in D-Cinema Plan

Disney, Warner, & Sony have teamed with Technicolor to roll out digital projectors in 3000 screens across the country, with the studios covering some portion of the costs as an attempt to offset the costs of creating and distributing prints.

Mike's Comments - about time it happened this way. One of the best quotes I heard at last year's Digital Cinema Summit at NAB was that the studios were the primary beneficiaries of digital projection, but the theaters were being expected to cover the costs, and that would never fly. I heard wind of this a couple of months ago, nice to see it happening.

With digital projection, yet another barrier to distribution of indie projects is potentially removed - film prints cost $30-60K US (or more for DI process). You could already screen digitally at all the major festivals, but for there to be NO requirement for a film print ever is a nice option. Now, whether they'll start allowing regional screenings, or micro-distributions, or micro-runs, is another question...if the big studios are fronting some large portion of the costs, does that mean that ONLY their digital movies can be screened on them according to the contracts? THAT would be a very interesting question...and quite possibly it might be that way - that they wouldn't want/allow somebody else's digital movie to be shown on the projectors they paid for...yet another potential way for the established players to control the means of distribution...

-mike