Brazil Takes Lead in All-Digital Cinema Projection

securitas writes "The CS Monitor's Andrew Downie reports that Brazil plans to open in May the world's largest digital movie theater network. About 100 theaters will use Sao Paulo-based Rain Networks' KinoCast digital theater DRM software. Rain based its system on Windows Media 9 software with MPEG-4 video compression. 'The MPEG-4 software can squeeze a feature film onto a file of just five gigabytes, 15 times smaller than the MPEG-2 technology presently used' at one-third the $150,000 cost. It takes 20 minutes to distribute a 90-minute film over a VPN and the system avoids the costs associated with transporting physical copies to areas largely inaccessible by road - it can cost up to $750,000 for 500 copies of a Matrix-type blockbuster to be distributed. Interestingly, in the affluent USA the fight between the 35,000 theater owners and Hollywood is about who will pay for cinemas to switch to digital projection. In December 2003 the Guardian published a story with more financial and technical details of the KinoCast digital cinema system."

Comments

Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

I run an independant Cinema and the cost per film is approximately 200-250 per showing. A lot of this cost is distribution and storage of the prints, so if digital projection happens then I would expect to see a suitable reduction in costs.

Prints wear out, which is why the image gets worse over time, however the resolution of 35mm is much greater than that of most digital systems that I know of.

DVD and DiVX look Awful on a big screen as you can see the artifacts on the system. This asks the question how it can be suitable for the large cinema screens.

Also converting a cinema to digital, while still having the ability to show film is going to be expensive. So who should pay the cinema, or the company that is saving millions on costs.

Another interesting point is do the distributers and films companies apporvie of the system?
If not it will die on it's feet before it even starts.

Call this a biased opinion from somebody who maintains windows servers (The cinema is in my spare time) but I can't see it being that long before the MS DRM (or any other system for that matter) is broken.

If this happens then all releases will go back to film as piracy is such a concern.

Don't read too much into it...

[dcs]

I live in Brazil's capital (which happens to be Brasilia, not Buenos Aires :), and there's not even a THX movie theather.