It’s not such a big number, “1000″, for a multi-billion dollar company like Texas Instruments. But in the very small pond of digital cinema, TI proclaimed a milestone had been achieved: 1,195 DLP cinema projectors have now been deployed around the globe and hailed it as “a major step towards the movie industry’s conversion from film to digital projection,”-and rightly so.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor
of Projection Monthly &
Microdisplay Report

Most moviegoers don’t know or even see the difference a digital projector makes in the image quality of the movie. And that’s part of the point. The traditional film image is golden-the standard “look” that home theater buffs spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to replicate in the home.

But as the worldwide transition from analog to digital marches on, it is now enveloping the film industry. Remember, from an early 19th century the film industry model has been to transport its precious content as relatively delicate film in “cans” shipped to movie theaters to run on technology not too far removed from Edison’s first movie projector. This must give way to efficient digital delivery mechanisms. In short, film prints are simply too expensive to make and port around from theater to theater.

Enter the digital projector. High-resolution 3-chip DLP or LCOS technology that can replicate the latest analog projected image flawlessly, but the projection technology is not the main point. This quality is a necessary requirement in the transition, but once achieved, the new business models can take on momentum of their own. In this new world, content moves from film in cans to virtual bits of ones and zeros stored in memory banks as data. This is ported via satellite-the same way your cable company gets its content, to massive RAID servers (storage devices) at the theater for display on any (or all) screens in the multiplex.

But, digital projection has been around since 1999, and satellite delivery even longer. So why has the digital transition taken so long and why are we just at the 1000 DLP projector milestone?

Glad you asked. Turns out, all this technology doesn’t do much to improve the bottom line of the movie theater owners, like the ones meeting in Las Vegas this week at their annual ShoWest convention. In fact, to hear them tell it, they were being called on to foot-the-bill in the transition. Scrap all that expensive analog film equipment and invest in this new digital stuff in order to save the (already super rich) film makers and distributors even more money. That message didn’t fly.

So it was financing more than technology that served to block the digital movie experience and as usual, the industry came up with some rather creative ways to deal with the disparity of benefit in making such a move. The breakthrough came in a Christie/AIX joint venture announcement that offered a 10-year agreement with build-out funding for the theater owner and brought in major Hollywood studios to supply the content.

In addition, the studios have agreed to issue credits for each film distributed digitally, to help pay for the expensive equipment transition. This helped other major distributors like Technicolor Labs, a division of French electronics giant Thomson; Deluxe Labs, a unit of Rank Group PLC; and Eastman Kodak Co. create deals with digital cinema manufacturers like Barco, NEC and Sony.

One last thing - the 1000 unit mark announced by TI is simply a slice in time number. Deals for up to 32,000 digital cinema system conversions are in the works according to TI, and that’s just DLP cinema projectors. We are well past the tipping point in digital cinema conversion and even though the popcorn is still overpriced, your next film may just be shown in digital-and you probably won’t notice the difference. But the exhibitors understand the difference. They can now continue to show a movie for years with no degradation in image quality, something film will never be able to offer. -SS