LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Movie history will be made on Tuesday when 20th Century Fox premieres the first movie to be beamed over the Internet from a Hollywood studio to a theater across the country without ever touching film, Fox officials said on Monday.

The animated sci-fi epic ``Titan A.E.'' will be digitally projected to an audience at the
Supercomm trade show in Atlanta after it has been sent from Burbank, California, over a secure Internet-based network developed by Cisco Systems Inc., the world's biggest maker of Internet equipment. The event will showcase a technology that could one day replace a movie distribution system that dates to the birth of the modern motion picture industry, about 80 years ago.

But with issues of cost and copyright protection yet to be addressed, Internet transmission of movies from studios to exhibitors is years away from becoming commonplace, officials at Fox and Cisco acknowledged on Monday. ``It's a small step toward looking at the future,'' said Tom Sherak, chairman of the Fox domestic film group. ``To me, it's like being at the World's Fair in 1964.''

Not cheap

The digital projector alone costs about $100,000, not to mention the added price of a
special screen, sound system and computer equipment needed to download and show ``Titan A.E.'' in digital format. Technically, speaking, however, ``What we're showcasing tomorrow is available now,'' Cisco spokeswoman Erica Schroeder said. ``It's all the business issues now that have to be resolved.''

A number of films, notably ``Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace'' and Disney's ``Dinosaur,'' have been digitally projected by a handful of theaters since last
year. But the Atlanta screening of ``Titan A.E'' marks the first time a studio has distributed its movie to a theater audience via the Internet.

Official premiere in normal theater

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Data over communication lines (even over non-internet lines) are broken up and sent in smaller chunks (called "blocks" or "frames.") The next chunk is not sent until the previous one is received OK. If there's a problem, it sort of automatically hits it's own "refresh" button, and only resends the bad chunk, rather than the whole thing. Actually, if you don't mind waiting, the internet is very reliable. It even continued worked quite well for Iraq while we were bombing the daylights out of them.

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I agree, let technicolor handle the "delivery" of DLP product and it will NEVER get off the shelf. I mean that too.

Dave

As I calculate this out, they are transmitting this at about 27 megabits/sec., which would easily fit into a standard T3 line, which is capable of 44 megabits/sec. It should be no trouble to transmit this over the conventional internet, let alone the mammoth Qwest backbone.

There are some new technologies out there that Qwest is testing with Nortel optical switches that claim 40 GIGAbits/sec. This would transfer a 40 Gigabyte file in about 8 seconds. The release implies that they can use a multiplexer to put 4X the data on one line, coming out to 160 gigabits/sec or 20 gigabytes per second. This technology will be ready to go in early 2001.
(http://www.qwest.com/about/media/story.asp?id=288)

So, it looks like the technology to deliver films to theatres via internet is closer than we thought.

Mark Lensenmayer
(Networking Teacher Guy)

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com

Lower priced T-1 service (approximately $1,900 per month?) would obviously be too slow, taking about 29 times longer to transmit the data (over 100 hours per movie?).

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com

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