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STUDIOS MAY HELP EXHIBS CONVERT TO DIGITAL
Today's Headlines

Executives of four of Hollywood's major studios have held discussions about forming a nonprofit company that would help financially troubled theater chains replace traditional film projectors with digital ones, the Wall Street Journal reported today (Thursday), citing people familiar with the matter. According to the newspaper, Disney, Sony, Warner Bros. and Paramount have been involved in the discussions, with Universal and 20th indicating that they may also participate. "We think the studios need to play a role in accelerating the deployment of digital cinema on favorable terms to theater operators," Phil Barlow, executive vice president of Walt Disney Motion Picture Group told the WSJ. However, the newspaper reported that the chains are worried about giving studios too much control over how films are exhibited.
"Whatever structure is developed has to leave the existing players in the same position as they are today, vis-a-vis the relationships on film booking, control of the projector within the theaters and so on," United Artists Theatre Co.'s CEO Kurt Hall told the WSJ.

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From an exhibitors standpoint, I would not be willing to pay any amount of money to save the studios cash. Maybe the film rental structure for DP should be lower than conventional. If the studios would come up with a film rental structure that would cover the costs of the new equipment and maintenance, in an average payback of two years per auditorium and then the extra savings were additional profit for the theatre, they might be on to something. With this type of agreement both parties would be ahead in the long run.

No it isn't. I won't go into the details of a rant, but the "upgrades" serve more to increase the MS profit line and reduce competition for the MS software than they do to add needed features to the systems.

Ticketpro, for example, has used a unix based system and avoided this trap. I've kept my software DOS based for this and other reasons. By following the crowd racing down the Windows path, many software developers are unknowingly on a death march, where the constant drain of having to buy more MS crap and time wasted learning more arcane rules bite into their profit margin and wear down their resolve to compete or keep their software compatible with the latest systems.

That glowing gold of the pot at the end of the MS rainbow is largely fool's gold, reached only through many toll gates on the private MS yellow brick road.