From the monthly archives:

December 2010

Executive Summary

December 2010

  • State of the Industry. Our bi-annual summary of issues that face the industry.  These issues are addressed in more detail throughout the report.
  • 3-D and Expectations. 3-D has been a significant driver for converting to digital cinema.  But is 3-D sustainable, and will 3-D for the home undermine 3-D in the cinema?
  • The Fulfillment Game. Fulfillment companies look to satellite for lowering the cost of distribution.  But is this the only game in town?
  • Content Mastering and Security Key Management. These are the services that have become synonymous with fulfillment.  But fulfillment companies have not been doing their job of managing the cost of these services, and could be facing difficulties as a result.
  • The Projection Booth. There is room for improvement in the projection booth.  We explore where “cinema-in-a-box” technology will lead.
  • DCI Compliance and its Future With NIST. Now bed pals with the ever-evolving NIST FIPS 140 spec, studios could be boxing themselves in.
  • Deployment Entities and the Transition. The industry is enjoying perhaps the highest rate of technology adoption that it may ever see.  But are we taking the right steps to ensure reasonable access to this technology for everyone?
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State of the Industry

December 2010

2010 has been a remarkable year for digital cinema.  The growth in screen count was phenomenal and unexpected.  A year ago, it was expected that sales would drop following the substantial growth that occurred in anticipation of Avatar’s successful 3-D release.  To the surprise of most manufacturers, the success of Avatar encouraged even more cinema [...]

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3-D and Expectations

December 2010

There is no question that 3-D technology has given digital cinema a reason to exist, beyond the mere ability to reduce distribution costs.  Maintaining the strength of 3-D as a lucrative media could be a challenge.  Will 3-D remain a novelty of the cinema, or will it rapidly expand into the home market?
Technology adoption is [...]

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The Fulfillment Game

December 2010

Studios have been enamored with the idea of sending movies to cinemas digitally by satellite ever since digital cinema began to emerge.  Equally so, satellite operators have been attracted to the idea of transmitting movies to theatres to fill out satellite dead time.  Boeing and Raytheon were early contenders for this space, with Boeing the [...]

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Content Mastering and Security Key Management

December 2010

Competition in the fulfillment space can be brutal, as studios push hard to squeeze cost out of the process.  A service that is often coupled with fulfillment is that of content mastering, whose deliverable is the digital cinema package, or DCP.  Coupled with this service is an even more important one:  that of security key [...]

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The Projection Booth

December 2010

Digital cinema equipment is anything but mature.  Early equipment architectures were not original, based on a standalone server and a standalone projector.  Texas Instruments had the option early on to include media block functionality in its licensed design for the DLP CinemaTM projector.  Had TI been more aggressive in its hardware approach, it could have [...]

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DCI Compliance and its Future with NIST

December 2010

This publication has dealt extensively with the issue of DCI compliance and the issues imposed by changes in the NIST FIPS 140 security requirements.  While NIST updated most of the FIPS 140-2 Annex documents in November, it didn’t provide further guidance on the transition to stricter rules for dual-use of security keys.  Details of NIST-imposed [...]

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Deployment Entities and the Transition

December 2010

When the raising the newly minted subject of virtual print fees (VPFs) in a breakfast meeting with a former studio executive in 2005, the spontaneous comment evoked was “history has shown that subsidies do not work.”  But subsidies combined with 3-D have proven otherwise.
The current digital cinema adoption rate is substantial, perhaps as good as [...]

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