India's Bollywood Opts for Low-Cost Digital Cinema

Makarand writes "While Hollywood is yet to figure out who will pay for the costly $100,000 digital projectors required for the digital roll-out of films, the Mumbai (India) based film Industry (called Bollywood) is settling for cheaper projectors of a bit lesser quality available at one-third the price, to proceed with their digital roll-out. Industry officials call this cheaper version of the digital cinema the 'E-Cinema', in contrast to the 'D-Cinema' which Hollywood is waiting for. Over 1000 films are made each year in India and just 1 film in 12 makes a profit. Transporting conventional celluloid prints to remote towns gives video pirates plenty of time to copy and make prints. Digital cinema will cut down on piracy and help the industry to increase its profits."

Comments

Re:only 1 in 12 makes a profit?

[metlin]

The film industry in India is a little more complicated than that, and even one movie that may turn a profit usually tends to bring in a whole lot of money that would cover the losses of several failed movies.

And relative to Hollywood, the amount invested in Indian movies is far lesser, so that's another reason.

Finally, the Bollywood has a lot of families which have been in the industry for a long time, so money isn't really a problem for a lot of them - they'd rather waste a lot of money making absolutely crappy movies just to launch a new actor or an actress from their family.

Re:Decrease Piracy?

[DarkMan]

True. However, that's not the problem. It dosen't really matter how hard it is to copy a film, it's currently happening.

At the moment, with film, it's not economic to roll out a film everywhere at once. Therefore there is a time lag between the first showings, and when it's available to view locally. This time lag is where the pirates are operating. If you can remove this lag, then one of the benefits of pirated films (faster access) is removed. Digital projectors bring the benefits of digital copying to the movie producers, as opposed to currently, where only the pirates are reaping the benefits.

As I understand it then, Bollywood is trying to defeat piracy by starving the pirates of a market.

Re:Decrease Piracy?

[shawb]

I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of watermarking showed up in DVD's soon.

This is actually pretty unlikely for the near future. Commercial DVDs are generally stamped on a die rather than burned like a CD-R; I'm not quite sure, but I assume burning a DVD would take at least ten minutes on home equpment and this could probably be cut down a little, but one minute or even thirty seconds would probably be too much time on industrial presses. And the machinery required for burning high volumes would be much more complex and error prone than stamping. Stamping greatly reduces the cost and increases the durability of high volume runs, but pretty much ensures that every copy is identical, so watermarking would not be realistic, AFAIK. As for the small volumes sent out for promo copies and advance screeners, those could realistically be burned, and so watermarking those makes some sense and that is where you hear about this being done.