Mainstream Data signed an agreement with Thompson and its Technicolor Digital Cinema business to provide an end-to-end high-speed digital satellite network for the distribution of pre-show content to movie theaters across North America.

Mainstream Data hopes to parlay that contract, announced July 13, into other growing business areas, including the distribution of full-length motion pictures, as well as digital signage and business television network applications.

For its deal with Technicolor Digital Cinema, Technicolor’s digital files will be sent to Mainstream Data’s network operations center in Salt Lake City, and then rebroadcast through a satellite connection to theaters, Maureen Ahern, vice president of sales and marketing, told Satellite News.

To provide the service, Mainstream Data has leased capacity on a Panamsat satellite and deployed a DVB+ receiver designed and manufactured by Mainstream Data into theaters.

Waiting For Hollywood

On its own, this deal with Technicolor Digital Cinema is a big win for Mainstream Data in terms of getting its products deployed into the cinema market, but the bigger windfall could come when the digital distribution of motion pictures becomes more of a market reality, Ahern said. When that will happen remains an unanswered question, but it also will be a market opportunity for satellite service providers, she said.

“How big the opportunity is for digital cinema is something that has been debated forever in the satellite business,” Ahern said. “Because of the conditions around digital cinema, satellite makes so much sense. [Digital cinema] is high bandwidth. It is geographically dispersed. It is a large number of sites, large outbound and small return channel.”

While everyone in the satellite industry knows what the opportunity is, the industry is waiting for Hollywood to do its part to make the digital cinema a market reality.

“Everybody has been anxiously awaiting for some sort of a sign that it’s really going to happen,” Ahern said. “It does seem like the cost of the projectors has come down. There have been committees and initiatives and alliances in Hollywood to make sure there are standards so that [there will be some uniformity in the deployment and] this is not just going to be all over the place.”

Even with the technology in place, digital cinema is facing other market forces that exist outside of the control of the satellite industry. The movie industry is in a well- publicized slump in terms of declining ticket sales, but digital cinema could play a potential role in that recovery, Ahern said.

“I’ve even read in the mainstream press about how ticket sales are down, and Steven Spielberg is a big proponent of digital cinema as a way of drawing people back into the theaters,” Ahern notes. “Whether that is actually going to happen, I don’t think anybody knows that. We are hoping, like a lot of the movie industry, that the better experience will lead to greater experience at the movie theaters” and bring about greater ticket sales and more demand for services such as those offered by Mainstream Data. However, “it is not anything that we can control,” she said.

Other Opportunities

While waiting for the movie industry to move to the next level in terms of the widespread offering of the digital movie-going experience, Mainstream Data is looking to use its digital cinema solution to tackle other growing market opportunities, particularly digital signage and business television applications.

“The solution we put in place for Technicolor technically is the same solution that can be used by many different applications,” Ahern said. “Digital signage and digital cinema have been two markets that have been talked about forever, and what is interesting about digital signage is that many of the existing rollouts were considered ‘pilots.’ But it really does feel, at least from what we have seen and different venues that we have been at and people we have been talking to, that this is a market that is finally beginning to grow. It is becoming real.”

Mainstream Data also is confident it will be able to use its digital cinema application to become a solid player in other markets.

“The Technicolor deal validates our solution,” Ahern said “If we can do that, we can certainly do advertisements to retail stores and restaurants, as well as interactive distance learning on business television networks. It essentially is, from Mainstream’s perspective, the same solution.”

— Gregory Twachtman

(Dina Murphy, Mainstream Data, 203/637-2077)