Is digital cinema in the picture?

With all the hoo-ha about getting full-length movies and broadcast TV onto the desktop and pushing interactive Web content onto the TV screen, another entertainment form has been receiving relatively scant attention: the local movie multiplex.

Earlier this month at the Supercomm show in Atlanta, a vertical group of companies banded to bring digital technology to the distribution and showing of movies. While the results are provocative, even the companies involved say the business issues behind the required technology upgrades will probably force movie studios to continue relying on celluloid and sneakernet to distribute their work to the public for some time.

In the Supercomm demo, Cisco Systems transmitted the 80-minute animated sci-fi movie "Titan A.E." as a 42 Gb/s digitized file - 20,000 times bigger than the average MP3 music download - from Los Angeles to a storage server in an Atlanta theater over a fiber optic Internet hook-up provided by Qwest Communications. From that server, the movie was piped to the theater's projector.

"This is really just to suggest the kind of applications that will be possible with digital technology," said Larry Lang, Cisco marketing vice president, before the demo.

"Not only will digital cinema help Hollywood produce higher-quality movies at lower cost, but its capabilities can be harnessed to deliver new video services to our customers," said Lewis Wilks, Qwest's president of Internet and multimedia markets.

Titan A.E. was beamed from the 20th Century Fox production facilities over Qwest's Internet backbone. The arrangement allowed the movie to travel from Burbank, Calif., to Atlanta in about two hours. The size of that 42 Gb/s file prevented real-time projection of the movie.

Other digital cinema technologies, such as one from Qualcomm, send files over the Internet to a central upload point, then uplink to a satellite that transmits it to a storage server located in the multiplex.

For certain, studios will realize cost savings in the print-making process - perhaps as much as one-third of the cost of the average movie, Lang said. But the big advantage of digital distribution will be a sharp reduction in the chances for movie piracy, which often occurs when one of 1000 prints of a movie "disappears" for a bit and then turns up in a pirated edition.

With digital cinema, the files are distributed under IPSec encryption and decoded at the projection booth. Should that encryption be cracked, the integration of digital watermarks will allow studios to track which digital file a bootleg copy was made from and plug the security leak.

But don't look for this summer's blockbusters in packetized form. While the technology is in place in several iterations, it costs a lot - about $100,000 for the digital projector alone, setting aside the cost of a special screen, a new sound system and the networking equipment needed to make it work.

"The vast majority of owners can't afford to make the switch to digital right now," said John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners. Owners will need to work out some formula with the movie studios, which are the primary beneficiaries of the new technology, he added.