I got back earlier today from Digimart, the global digital (film) distribution summit, in Montreal. The conference was 2/3 days of sessions on the topics of digital film and on its implications of distribution, both hard-copy and digital. In a word, it was great.

The conference was organized by Daniel Langlois (founder of Soft Image, a pioneer in digital effects ala Jurassic Park) and was truly international in its make-up. Besides numerous Canadian and American film-makers and distributors there were also those from the U.K., Australia, Brazil, Peru and China. And those were just the people I met. But the bottom line is that this group of Independent type film makers were quite convinced that the future of everything film is digital.

Mark Cuban gave the keynote where he discussed HDNet's new "day and date" release strategy where they were going to simultaneously release new movies in cinema on HDnet/cable and on DVD all on the same day. To compensate for this radical approach, initial DVDs would cost perhaps $10 more and they would kick back 1% of sales to the Cinema owners showing their movie to incentivize them to buy into this system. He also mentioned that HDNet would be making available what he called "laptop quality" copies for direct download of their films. I guess even the big boys can't afford to do full quality copies without embracing p2p.

In general I spent a lot of time soaking up knowledge from those in the film industry. For one, I can say that there is a lot of resistance to Hollywood's new "DCI" Digital Cinema Initiative. The general concensus (surprise) is that their new guidelines about showing HD films is all about their control of cinema and not at all about image quality. Though it also seemed the perception was that this was okay because it only shows them continuing to fumble the ball on content delivery allowing in the little guy to come in and provide lower-cost solutions with better image quality. I would say I tend to agree. I would say I'm also glad to watch most of the big guys continue to fumble the ball and provide these opportunities.

And overall, the panel and demo I did on Prodigem seemed to be a home run. Having spent two days in this first-of-a-kind conference sharing and creating a collective knowledge on how to make digital film distribution a reality, it was great to show that this didn't mean that film makers were confined to just selling DVDs from their websites while they wait 3-5 years for IPTV to become a reality. Without a hitch I had recorded the audio from the session before my panel, Cory Doctorow on DRM, and no less than 20 minutes after it ended was I able to show it turned around and ready for massive-scale digital distribution via a torrent. And though this could of course be used to sell movies through Prodigem, it could also be used for providing free outtakes and clips while a movie is even still in production, adding a new marketing arm to movie making.

Let's see where this takes us.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 07:51 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)