Deluxe "eCinema" delivery service is coming in December

[Mike Blakesley]

In December, Deluxe is rolling out a broadband cinema content delivery service, called eCinema by Deluxe. It will be similar to the DCDC satellite program -- they put a capture server in your theater, and then the content is copied over to your system. Rather than satellite, content is delivered via 100mb (minimum) broadband.

The best feature is, they have two programs -- one for big theaters, and one for small guys like yours truly. In the big program, you get broadband provided by Deluxe, and they also provide the capture server.

In the small-venue program, they provide the capture server but you have to provide your own 100mb broadband.

Movie delivery costs $25 each, the same as what DCDC charges.

One major difference is, rather than downloading every movie in creation to your system and then deleting them after a few weeks, it only downloads what you have booked; and there apparently won't be as short of a "time limit" on how long each movie will be in the system, so you can play something off the break and still be able to get it. Repertory content will be covered too, and of course trailers. As soon as your booking goes into the system, it downloads the content to your local server. If a download happens to fail, they will know about it and will automatically ship out a hard drive for no charge.

So....DCDC can suck it.

I'm not sure if the terms are the same all over or if they negotiate with each theater, but that was the deal we got. Being the gadget freak that I am, I'm looking forward to getting this installed... just sent the paperwork in today.

Here's a link to a video that doesn't give much information but it does have some cool graphics and an email address to write to.

https://vimeo.com/591353008

[Frank Cox]

$25 per movie is cheaper than $50 to the courier but I still prefer the deal from Cinesend since they don't charge theatres anything for downloading features.

They did say they were planning to charge for trailers but I haven't heard anything more about that since I got their device.

[Marcel Birgelen]

That $25 per movie is still quite a price tag for a digital download, but I guess you don't pay a subscription fee or anything else for the box?


It will be interesting to see how well this works and how complete the offer will be.

[Scott Norwood]

It still seems kind of expensive.

Amazon Web Services (for example) charges $.09/GB for outbound data transfer, so a 60GB feature would cost $5.40 in bandwidth to deliver.

Let's say that the box costs $3k and lasts for five years. That figures to be $50/month.

If you show one movie per week, that would be under $18 per title. It's an even worse deal for anyone who shows more than one movie per week. Plus, the cinema has to pay for its own Internet connection. And these are retail prices, which we can all be sure that Deluxe isn't paying. It's not a complete rip-off, but they're definitely making a nice profit on it.

[Mike Blakesley]

Well as of now we’re paying $40 per title for hard drive delivery, and we already have the broadband service so it’s a cost savings for us. The convenience is my favorite feature though.

[Frank Cox]

I agree completely about the convenience, and $25 per movie is still cheaper than the $50 that I'm paying for courier service.

Ultimately I guess it'll just come down to what service the movie companies decide to distribute their stuff through.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Did Deluxe already indicate what content will be available on their "e-delivery" service? Will all the content they normally distribute in DCP format be available or is it just a select few titles? Because I expect them to require prior authorization from the studios they work for, before the content will appear on their on-line distribution platform. As soon as stuff starts to hit "the Internet", studios are notorious to hit the brake, for whatever, often completely made-up reason.

[Frank Cox]

Well, that didn't take long.

I got an email from Cinesend earlier this afternoon stating that they are entering into a "partnership" with Deluxe. As of December 6 all features and trailers will be downloaded to the Cinesend device and no hard drives will be sent out any more. Also, the current end-user access to the device for deleting content will be disabled so the presence or absence of all content will now be managed solely by Deluxe. And Deluxe is the outfit to contact with any questions or for technical support.

Even though the email says this is a partnership between Deluxe and Cinesend, the email sounds more like the whole thing has just been absorbed by Deluxe.

I wonder what theatres without one of these devices are supposed to do if they can't get high-speed Internet at their location. That's not a problem that I have to deal with here, fortunately.

[Tom Bert]

I'm confused on the flow of the $25: is it the exhibitor paying to download the movie? Is this for a "back-catalog" use case?

I assumed that for normal releases the distributor/studio bared the delivery cost (and got his money back via the ticket revenue share)?

[Martin McCaffery]

Yes, the exhibitor is paying to download the movie. The exhibitor currently pays to have the movie shipped to them.
I had a pretty good chat with Deluxe salesperson about the whole thing, It sounds promising, but they are still getting the bugs worked out and I'm going to wait until they do.

[Tom Bert]

Is there then also a price/sum paid by the distributor or studio to the delivery company? Or is it free to them and fully exhibitor-paid? That sounds strange and counter-intuitive to: "A studio carries the upfront cost and risk for a movie release; and gets its ROI via ticket revenue share"

[Leo Enticknap]

I assumed that for normal releases the distributor/studio bared the delivery cost (and got his money back via the ticket revenue share)?

As Martin notes, exhibitors (in the USA, at any rate) typically do pay up front for the shipping of CRU drives to and from their theaters. This is usually done on the distributor's FedEx or UPS account, and the distributor adds this as a line item on their invoice to the exhibitor.

But the other online delivery services (e.g. EclairPlay and CineSend) don't seem to be adopting this business model, instead providing the hardware and downloads at no up-front cost to the exhibitor. However, as I understand it, these systems only handle arthouse and niche content, with Deluxe having a monopoly on mainstream Hollywood titles. I guess they figure that exhibitors will still be willing to pay what they were before, for the convenience and reliability of not having to handle physical media anymore (failed deliveries, drive arrives DOA or is the wrong movie, time taken shunting drives in and out of CRU readers, etc. etc.).

[Mike Blakesley]

It's going to cost less than before, because they are dropping the per-movie price from $40 to $25. When they first started shipping hard drives, it was $49, so they're basically at half of what they used to charge.

From Frank's post above, it looks like Deluxe just bought CineSend....and they're now going to use that platform and call it "eCinema."

Did Deluxe already indicate what content will be available on their "e-delivery" service? Will all the content they normally distribute in DCP format be available or is it just a select few titles? Because I expect them to require prior authorization from the studios they work for, before the content will appear on their on-line distribution platform. As soon as stuff starts to hit "the Internet", studios are notorious to hit the brake, for whatever, often completely made-up reason.

The salesperson told me that the system will have current and repertory titles, plus trailers, on the service. Trailers will deliver automatically when they come out, and when a feature booking is entered into the system, it's automatically downloaded onto your local device.

I picture Deluxe as having this huge farm of servers where all the movies they handle are stored, and they can pull anything needed up and send it out.... sort of like the streamers do with the content they have.

I'm hoping they have a way to filter out some of the trailers....for example, I would like to have the most recent trailers only, in most cases, and there's no need for us to download the arthouse stuff unless it becomes mainstream-successful.

[Brad Miller]

Maybe something good will come from this and "last minute bookings" will become a thing of the past since Deluxe's system won't be able to deal with it whereas DCDC's system can.

[Barry Floyd]

$25 per feature is more than we're paying DCDC per film. Is DCDC not available to everyone?