Excerpt from 'Inventing' in Digital Cinema Report

Nick Dager edits one of the most respected sites that focuses on digital cinema, Digital Cinema Report. The September "edition" of the site includes a new excerpt from Inventing the Movies, which I adapted especially for Nick's site. It covers the many false starts of the digital cinema revolution...from predictions in the 1940s and 1950s that digital cinema was right around the corner... to efforts by Pacific Bell, George Lucas, and Texas Instruments in the late 1990s...to the present day, when we still haven't hit the digital cinema "tipping point."

A snippet from the beginning of the excerpt:

When did the digital cinema revolution begin, and who started it?

A handful of Hollywood soothsayers were predicting the imminent arrival of digital cinema in the middle of the 20th century. In 1949, the independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, who’d helped to launch three Hollywood studios (Paramount, MGM, and United Artists), anticipated the development of video-on-demand systems that would allow movie fans to view the movies they wanted to see at home, as well as methods for delivering a movie electronically to thousands of theaters, saving the studios the cost of making film prints.

A few years later, in 1954, Albert Abramson, a CBS television engineer, published an article titled, “A Motion-Picture Studio of 1968.” In it, he sketched out how digital cinematography and a film-free distribution system would work: movies would be shot with electronic cameras, and then “sent by radio-relay or coaxial cable to the theaters. Five or fifty theaters in an area may be receiving the same program. An area may cover the whole state, a county, or just a large city. But no theater is shipped the actual picture tape.” Abramson also expected that by 1968, a new generation of electronic cameras would be totally self-contained and cordless – capable of capturing 3-D imagery and transmitting it wirelessly back to the production center.

YouTube Hearts TiVo ... Video Overload on the Net ... ShoWest Report ... And More

- YouTube and TiVo have gotten together to deliver YouTube videos to about 800,000 TiVo users who have the right box and the necessary broadband connection. TiVo has never shared any stats on how many of their users are getting content from the Internet this way (and likely won't, anytime soon). TiVo did an earlier deal with Brightcove; the new YouTube link won't be active until later this year, says the Wall Street Journal.

- Could video kill the Internet star? Here's a NY Times piece worth reading. Steve Lohr writes:

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

- The LA Times offers a good overview piece of what has been happening at the ShoWest convention in Vegas this week... mostly excitement about digital 3D. Jeffrey Katzenberg was there plugging 'Monsters vs. Aliens,' the spring 20009 DreamWorks Animation release, and its first in 3D. Katzenberg says the extra cost is about $15 million; he hopes there will be 3000 to 5000 screens capable of showing 3D by the time it is released.

- Imax and Texas Instruments have apparently done a deal to use TI's DLP (digital light processing) chips in a new kind of projection system being designed by Imax. (It's not clear yet who will actually make the projectors.) The Hollywood Reporter writes:

Imax...has since its inception 40 years ago used 70mm film to distribute and exhibit movies. By converting to digital, it will dramatically change its business model as digital distribution removes print costs -- about $22,000 for a 2-D print and $45,000 for a 3-D print -- from the equation.

Imax's move to TI is a blow to Sony because Imax had been developing a digital system that employed two Sony 4K projectors and proprietary technology.

- I've been having a good time using Hulu in the beta test period. It helped introduce me to 'Arrested Development,' and I actually didn't mind going out to rent the DVDs of episodes that weren't available on the Hulu site. I also deepened my knowledge (and enjoyment) of '30 Rock,' a show I catch on TV only occasionally. I didn't mind the commercials; the one thing that occasionally bugged me was the fact that you can't store video on your laptop for later viewing (IE, put a show on pause, wait for the whole thing to stream, and then start playing). That makes Hulu tough to use with spotty Internet connections, or if you want to store a show while you're sitting in the airport and then watch it on the plane. (I tried.)

But on the whole, Hulu does a lot right... including allowing you to embed the videos anywhere.

Dan Carew, a blogger in Hong Kong, has a very different opinion, since users outside the US are barred from Hulu (likely because of NBC and Fox's distribution contracts in foreign territories.)

Here's the NY Times story on Hulu's launch.

Rave is largest chain to go all digital

Last February, UltraStar Cinemas in Southern California was the first chain to put digital projectors in all their booths.

This month, Rave Motion Pictures, headquartered in Dallas, is claiming that it is the largest chain to add digital projectors to all of its projection booths (so far).

From the press release:

All 427 screens at 27 stadium theater complexes, located in eleven states, will now feature state-of-the-art AccessIT (NASDAQ: AIXD) systems and DLP Cinema® projectors from Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN). This represents one of the largest overall deployments of this revolutionary means of presentation and constitutes the biggest percentage adoption of any chain in the world to date.

Access IT systems enable all feature films to now be exhibited in JPEG2000 via their satellite delivery systems or hard drive download. DLP Cinema® technology then displays that image onto the screen with amazing clarity and vibrancy. Unlike the traditional 35mm presentations, there is absolutely no degeneration of image as the engagement progresses.