Audio Video News

Add this to your list of fading artifacts of the 20th century: bulky reels of film delivered to theaters by truck. Digital video satellite feeds are destined to replace shipments of physical product.

A coalition of inter-industry companies is positioning itself for the transition. Disney's Miramax film studio, Texas Instruments, Boeing Space & Communications Group, Williams Communications Vyvx Services, QuVIS, EnergyDigital, and AMC Theatres are among the companies teaming up to beam movies directly to theaters. The coalition kicked off the new era November 14 by projecting a satellite feed of the Miramax film Bounce in AMC's Emporium 25 Theater in New York's Times Square. The theater company has installed satellite dishes and digital projection gear in nine of its megaplex theaters in the US and in Japan.

Among the many benefits that digital feed-and-projection will offer are reduced distribution costs. A single satellite can provide feeds to almost every theater in the US, for example, as direct broadcast satellites do now for television. "A satellite's inherent capability to deliver point-to-multi-point information allows it to send one movie to thousands of theaters in a matter of hours at a fraction of traditional costs," said Tig H. Krekel, president of Boeing Satellite Systems. "We can distribute locally, nationally, or worldwide in a matter of hours."

Another benefit is the elimination of wear on film stock—surface scratches that cause increasing numbers of "glitches" in movies the longer they run. Movies look best when they are first released, and satellite feeds from films archived on large hard-disk drives will preserve that first-run look.

Digital feeds need to be encrypted to prevent interception and illegal copying, of course. Drawing on its military satellite experience, Boeing is also handling piracy prevention, with a technology it calls Cinema Connexion. Williams Communications Vyvx Services provided secure fiber-optic transmission for the showing of Bounce through its network operations and satellite uplink support center. In the AMC theaters, Texas Instruments DLP projectors created high-quality images.

Of the November 14 launch, Miramax president Mark Gill said, "This is a landmark day for the movie business—the beginning of a new, faster, and better way to distribute motion pictures . . . For moviegoers, this is the start of a massive quality improvement: the end of torn film, fading, and scratches, and the beginning of true digital projection, where the last screening of a movie looks as good as the first."

Disney plans to release many of its films as digital satellite transmissions, but in the interim it will be shipping digital disks to theaters. Among the titles to be so released are Tarzan, Toy Story 2, Fantasia 2000, and the soon-to-be-released 102 Dalmatians.