AccessIT recently announced it is beginning its Phase 2 program to install a total of 10,000 d-cinema projectors in theaters over the next three years. These projectors will be financed by a virtual print fee, and Walt Disney Studios, Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, and Universal Pictures have agreed to pay this fee for all of their movies shown on these projectors "for a limited time only." Insight Media believes "limited time" means until the projectors are paid for.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

This phase 2 deployment comes on top of the already completed phase 1 program. To date, AccessIT has contracted for and completed the rollout of more than 3,700 digital cinema projectors in forty-one states with exhibitors including Atlas Theatres, Allen Theatres, Carmike Cinemas, Celebration! Cinema, Cinema West, Cinetopia, Emagine, Galaxy Cinema, Marquee Cinemas, MJR Theatres, Neighborhood Cinema Group, Rave Motion Picture Theatres, Showplace Cinemas, UltraStar, and AccessIT’s own Pavilion Digital Showcase Theatre in Brooklyn, New York.

It might be worth reviewing the history and forecasts for digital cinema, to see if everything is on track. The Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) consortium issued its specification for digital cinema July 20, 2005. Consortium members, which included the four studios working with AccessIT on Phase 2 plus Sony and Warner Brothers. MGM had been a member but dropped out before the standard was issued. The DCI standard is primarily a specification of the file format consortium members would use to deliver digital movies. Essentially it was an announcement to the projector makers and the theater owners "If you want to show one of our movies in digital form, your projector must be able to decode this file." This brought a welcome breath of standardization into the industry because before this point there had been multiple file formats supported by different projectors. One of the main goals for the DCI standard was to make it unnecessary for the studios to encode their movies in more than one format. SMPTE went to work after DCI was issued turning the DCI spec into SMPTE standards and recommended practices.

According to a December 2005 press release from AccessIT, "The Pavilion Theatre is the first, and to date, the only movie theatre equipped to show digital movies to paying audiences utilizing this advanced technology standard." This theater used Christie cinema projectors, as did the 150 expected additional DCI-compliant digital cinema screens to open by the end of 2005. Currently there are about 4000 digital cinema screens in the US, out of a total of about 37,000. Of these 4000, about 1000 are equipped for showing 3D films. Insight Media expects that by the end of 2008 there may be as many as 9000 screens, including the ones from AccessIT/Christie. Three years from now (2011), at the end of the AccessIT Phase 2, we are forecasting about 30,000 digital screens. Virtually 100% of US screens will be digital by 2012. By then, a few theaters will be dual installations and have a film projector to show films from the archives but virtually all new releases from Hollywood and independent film producers are expected to be shown in digital format in the US. There are about 125,000 screens world-wide. Insight Media doesn’t have a formal forecast for penetration into the world-wide market after 2012, but the rest of the world seems to be about 2 years behind the US in the adoption of digital cinema. Does that mean that by 2014 film will be dead? Stay tuned.

Chris Chinnock is currently at ShoWest in Las Vegas. This is the premier trade show for the cinema industry, so we can expect to hear more from him on the state-of-the-industry in the April issue of Large Display Report.

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