Can satellites go Hollywood? A satellite network might form the heart of a new distribution system for electronic cinema
americasnetwork.com
July 15, 1999
By Dan Sweeney
lectronic cinema — that is, the replacement of motion picture
photography in movie theaters by a form of high-resolution video, is a timely
topic in Hollywood. Lucasfilm Ltd. has officially endorsed the concept to the
extent of sponsoring special public showings of the latest "Star Wars"
installment, "The Phantom Menace," in electronic format. Furthermore, every
major studio has set up committees to study the issue.
A consensus appears to be developing on the inevitability of a changeover to
video. Out of dozens of individuals interviewed for this article, both on
background and on the record, only two doubted the general wisdom of the
move. One of those doubters was an executive of Rochester, N.Y.-based
Kodak, a company with perhaps the most to lose from a video takeover.
"In less than five years, digital cinema will be well established in exhibitions,"
predicts Phil Barlow, executive vice president of the motion picture group at
Disney (Burbank, Calif.) and a vocal studio proponent of the new technology.
"Economics will dictate the change. We simply have to change what we're
doing with theatrical releases in order to make them more profitable. We
cannot depend upon recouping production costs from video anymore."
Why is a change to a purely electronic medium likely on economic grounds?
For reasons discussed here, electronic cinema promises to cut production and
distribution costs significantly, as well as boost revenues. But, at least in its
initial stages, the new medium faces a number of highly significant challenges, of
which perhaps none is more formidable than the establishment of essentially
new modes of distribution and delivery. Already a certain segment of the
industry is betting that a satellite network will form the heart of the new
distribution system, and that satellite technology will be the key determinant in
the success of electronic cinema.
The Movie Channel
Remarkably, in this, the last year of the 20th century, feature films are still
delivered to the viewing public in essentially the same way they were in the first
year the century. Much as they've always been, film prints are hand-duplicated
at film processing plants and hand-delivered by courier to the theaters. Indeed,
an impresario of the nickelodeon era would find nothing unusual in the way the
distribution business is handled today and would see little indication on the
operational level that that process is likely to change fundamentally in the future.
It seems likely that this process will not change so long as photographic film
remains the medium of commercial motion pictures.
Traditional film distribution obviously works, or it wouldn't have survived for so
long. But that doesn't alter the fact that film itself is a relatively expensive and
fragile medium, and that film replication is a painstaking and time-consuming
process. If motion pictures could be freed from dependence on a single
physical medium and instead represented as numerical data, as to an increasing
extent are music and television programming, then a major cost factor could be
eliminated.
Of course this process needn't necessarily involve a satellite network. Digital
copies on optical disc could be produced and distributed in the traditional
manner of film copies, albeit at a tiny fraction of the cost of film duplication.
Some in the industry see electronic cinema following this model, initially.
"There's definitely a comfort factor associated with a DVD disc array in the
theater as compared to network distribution," explains Monica Dashwood,
general manager of Lucasfilm's THX division (Hollywood, Calif.), which
certifies commercial theaters for exhibition quality and is planning on extending
their certification program to encompass the new medium. "You're not asking
the theater owners to change everything overnight."
Perhaps not, but a disc-based digital video system would bring little
improvement in the responsiveness and flexibility of the distribution arm of the
industry. Thus, the disc-based system wouldn't fully exploit the potential of a
digital medium to transform the exhibition process. The real desideratum is
network distribution — over the air or over the wires.
Electronic distribution at the current levels of resolution proposed by Japan's
JVC, which is the only manufacturer of production video projectors for
commercial theaters, would require DS3 for real-time transmission and multiple
T1s for store and forward over reasonable lengths of time. Currently, only fiber
rings and broadband wireless could accommodate such throughputs on the
local level. Neither type of network is close to being ubiquitous in the U.S. or
elsewhere. That leaves satellites.
Some argue that lower throughput rates approaching those in use for
high-definition broadcast television might suffice. However, Steve Morley, vice
president of technology at Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego), which claims to have
developed a complete end-to-end satellite based system, will have none of
that.
"Lower rates may be okay for home video," Morley says, "but on a 50-foot
screen you get artifacts if you go any lower than about 40 megabits. And
satellite is the only feasible way of achieving those rates over a ubiquitous
footprint."
"We don't see any other network-based system in the running," agrees Scott
Cress, director of broadcast products at Hughes Network Systems
(Germantown, Md.), which is in negotiations with one major studio and two
third-party integrators to develop a commercial system for the exhibitions
industry. "Satellite is the only practical solution."
Not everyone in the industry is convinced, however. "We could see using
ISDN lines to distribute the files," says Dave Schnuelle, a consultant with
Lucasfilm who has been instrumental in that company's electronic cinema
program. Spokespersons for Texas Instruments (TI; Dallas), which markets the
DMM (deformable micro mirrors) video projector technology currently vying
with the Hughes-JVC light valve for supremacy, as well as for AndAction
(Reseda, Calif.), which offers an end-to-end network solution for exhibitors,
both believe terrestrial networks are viable distribution channels as well.
A principal objection to satellite distribution is the "gatekeeper" argument.
"We don't want someone like Qualcomm involved as a middleman," insists
Barlow. "That's parasitic." Others agreed (off the record).
But Ron Maehl, president of Loral's CyberStar division, impatiently dismisses
all such counterarguments. "There are companies out there claiming they'll be
delivering movies over the Internet. It's so ridiculous. Information theory tells us
the limits of video compression, and 56K connections are never going to be
remotely adequate. Qualcomm is right. You need several tens of megabits of
throughput. You're not going to get that with terrestrial networks based on NT
servers. And that's ignoring the problem of doing multicasting over IP. Satellite
is clearly the only way to go at present.
"Sure, we're aware of the gatekeeper argument," Maehl says. "But as long as
equipment is standards-based, the studios can always go to another carrier."
What's Driving It,
and How It Might Happen
In 1994, I had lunch with Gerald Nash, a principal in the firm of Sigma Designs
(Los Angeles), a company devoted to the optical design of both public movie
theaters and private screening rooms. During that meeting, Nash discussed
contractual work the firm had undertaken toward the design of a digital theater.
The distribution method was to be satellite. Due to a nondisclosure agreement,
Nash could not reveal the sponsor.
Two years later, Japan's Sony Corp., which by then owned a movie studio and
had developed high-resolution video cameras specifically to replace 35-mm
film cameras, began publicizing electronic cinema heavily. Sony later retreated
from active advocacy, but the company permanently raised the visibility of the
new technology.
It was also a pivotal year in 1996 for two other electronic cinema champions,
CineComm (Los Angeles) and CyberStar. Both companies offer purely
satellite solutions.
"In '96 the technology was finally ready," relates Russ Wintner, chief
technology officer at CineComm, "and the business began to make sense
economically. That's when we launched." CineComm represents a joint venture
between Qualcomm and JVC, and currently offers a comprehensive
end-to-end solution for exhibitors.
CyberStar's Maehl realized the potential of the business during negotiations
with a studio for the satellite backhaul of dailies. "If it would work for that, why
not use it as a primary delivery system? We've been talking to the studios for
the past three years, and we've actually had some commercial showings of a
movie called ‘The Last Broadcast,' which was shot in high-resolution video
and then downloaded to projectors via satellite," he says.
Both Qualcomm and CyberStar currently favor Ku-band transmissions down
to inexpensive small-dish receivers, although Maehl allows that "Ka-band is
definitely a possibility in the future."
Both also believe that the transmissions must be heavily encrypted and that
decoding must occur only in the projector itself. Over-the-air security is clearly
a strong concern with the movie industry. Cylink, the leading manufacturer of
highly secure hardware encryptors, indicates that they're in negotiations with at
least one studio to secure satellite transmissions.
The Business Case
Does the motion picture industry really represent a vibrant new market for
satellite carriers?
"We see it as a niche market," says Scott Cress of Hughes. "How many movies
are released a year, and how long would it take to download them all? It
clearly won't afford us the sales provided by broadcast television, but we see
potential. And it ultimately might involve more than just feature film releases."
"It won't involve that much airtime," agrees Morley. "But what it could involve
is the rental of a half or even an entire transponder to allow for movies to be
downloaded on demand."
Of course, such speculations ultimately hinge upon the viability of the whole
concept of electronic cinema, which in turn depends on the benefits the industry
as a whole can hope to obtain from a purely electronic image storage and
presentation system.
The most frequently cited benefit associated with an all-electronic system is
sharply reduced cost for the actual software product. Thirty-five millimeter
feature films today cost in excess of $2,000 per print, with a hit movie
generating as many as several thousand prints. Thus a successful general
release movie can easily incur duplication costs of several million dollars.
Indeed, film duplication can run to 10% of total production costs in a film
produced on an average budget.
Proponents see benefits beyond merely reduced duplication costs, however. A
singularly attractive aspect of the change to an electronic medium, at least in
regard to network-distributed electronic cinema, is the possibility of the studios
responding instantaneously to accelerated demand. If the movie proves
unexpectedly popular, the network can deliver it to any number of theaters to
meet the increased demand. Within an individual theater complex, the movie
can be delivered to any number of screens simultaneously from a single server.
There's no need to rush extra prints into production only to see demand cool
by the time they're prepared.
The prophets of electronic cinema also see the new medium stimulating an
increased viewership by virtue of superior presentation quality, although such
claims are disputed. Actual line resolution of the image according to currently
proposed standards is only at the top end of high-definition broadcast quality,
1,280 lines, with information density no better than 35-mm film. Opinion in the
film community is currently divided on the issue of whether the proposed video
standards for commercial presentation provide equivalent image quality to
pristine film. However, no one denies that film deteriorates with repeated
showings.
In terms of soundtracks, electronic cinema would appear to hold a decisive
advantage over film. Currently, movie sound is recorded on noisy,
bandwidth-limited analog sound tracks and severely data-compressed digital
tracks — generally both simultaneously. Electronic cinema would permit the
use of as many as 12 uncompressed, extremely high-resolution digital audio
tracks of better than CD quality.
Electronic cinema's biggest boosters are the studios, as they stand to reap the
most immediate financial benefits. The exhibitors themselves tend to be
ambivalent. Digital projection equipment is expected to run at least $100,000
per screen initially, and the video servers and internal fiber networks proposed
in some schemes would further add to the cost. Proponents are optimistic that
cost objections can be overcome, however. "Some kind of cost sharing
arrangement will be worked out," says Barlow. "We're not going to ask the
exhibitors to assume the full risk."
July 15, table of contents
Copyright 1999 Advanstar Communications. Please send any technical comments or
questions to the America's Network webmaster.
|
