Can Hollywood Reinvent Itself in the Age of Digital Cinema?
On January 4, 2002, following almost a yearlong process of discussion and experimentation, my company Quantum Digital, a digital cinema content provider and technology integrator, together with Odeon, the UK’s largest cinema operator, announced a commercial agreement between us to launch Odeon Digital Cinema. This made Odeon the first exhibitor in the world to formerly organise and dedicate resources to a specific digital cinema team. Quantum Digital will work exclusively with Odeon running branch totally committed to digital technology, to develop opportunities in digital cinema and to show market leadership in the digital transition that is clearly inevitable for the cinema industry worldwide.
Chiefly we aim to commercially exhibit non-film “alternative content” events such as pop concerts, sports, Broadway musicals and other new forms of entertainment that will increase and diversify the variety of coming attractions to our audience. We welcome content providers and technology innovators in these fields to come and talk to us about developing these new opportunities. [an error occurred while processing this directive] As Quantum Digital’s Managing Director I will be heading Odeon Digital Cinema from an office at the Aylesbury Odeon officially as Head of Odeon Digital Cinema. Aylesbury is the town where Quantum is based and is a convenient fifty minutes travel to or from London, ensuring that trips and meetings are viable. This article is as much an introduction to this initiative as it is an essay posing the title question, which I will come onto shortly.
Quantum Digital’s email contact list, of which all are recipients of this, our first newsletter, numbers approximately six hundred industry contacts from all across the world. These span vast, diverse sectors including film, television, technology, marketing, music, press, finance, advertising, law and many other fields. The exciting thing about digital cinema is how it generates a synergy across all these diverse professions. The potential for shared prosperity is already being realised and I am dedicated to helping this forward.
Of the recipients of this first newsletter I have either personally met and developed relationships with most of you or at least will have emailed or spoken to many others over the telephone. Although there will be some I have not yet managed to introduce myself to but whose contact details I have from being on numerous UK and European digital cinema committees. This seems a fitting way to initiate fresh introductions as well as update those who have known -- and even participated in -- Quantum and Odeon’s progress of last year.
Together Quantum Digital and Odeon cinemas had already held a successful one-day digital cinema demonstration at Odeon West End last October that involved digitised Hollywood trailers being shown along with digitised, compressed and encrypted European film trailers transmitted via satellite from Paris to London. This event aimed to be new and progressive in that a true business platform was being launched rather than being yet another ad hoc demonstration. World leading equipment and service providers including Dolby, France Telecom, Barco and EVS Digital Cinema participated in the event.
Quantum’s role was as the technology integrator, knitting all the links together and centrally managing the interdependent activities. This was then followed by a major, commercial event to prove Quantum and Odeon could take digital cinema to the paying public. On November 13th and 14th Quantum Digital brokered and co-ordinated the presentation of four, highly praised digital screenings of a Broadway musical, Stephen Sondheim’s Putting It Together, at Odeon Leicester Square in the main 2000 seat theatre. This involved the use of Odeon Leicester Square’s onsite QuBit server and the Texas Instruments Mark V prototype DLP Cinema projector and marked the first time in Europe a Broadway show had been digitally screened in any cinema. Since this was a single venue event we did not conduct a satellite transfer of the content as the courier of a Mammoth 2 tape proved sufficient.
The show had been recorded live-in-performance by Broadway Television Network at Broadway's Barrymore Theatre using 10 digital high definition cameras and over 40 surround-sound microphones in a 5.1 surround sound format which is ideal for projection in a cinema environment. Over 1,500 people attended and 80% saying they would pay to see such “alternative content” in a cinema again.
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