Ireland is set to become the world’s first country to have digital film in every cinema.
All movie houses in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are to have their traditional 35mm film projectors replaced.
Wow, that news from BBC came out of the blue. I know that an initiative was pushing to convert Scottish cinemas, but the whole of Ireland? That’s one mean feat.
An American company is installing digital projectors in 500 cinemas to replace the traditional film projectors.
Five hundred cinemas is a huge number, this is bound to cost an absolute fortune. The cost of the digital equipment is high, and as someone said in a comment before, digital equipment becomes obsolete so easily and the latest version is out before you know it.
Cinemas using the technology will be able to download the latest releases to a computer server via satellite at a lower cost.
“We don’t have big Hollywood budgets to market those films so any way we can save money on distribution costs and actually spend it on promotion and advertising can only be a good thing,” said Ms Horgan…
…Sports, Arts and Tourism Minister John O’Donoghue said it would ensure a “cinema in Tralee has the same immediate access to films as a cinema in Dublin”.
Irish movie lovers have the second highest level of cinema attendance in Europe.
So the costs will be saved in distribution, and as we’ve seen before, the costs of reproducing reels of film are very expensive. It will be interesting to see if this works. Oh, and who guessed Ireland have the second highest cinema attendance in Europe?! There’s a huge surprise.
This could be an ideal model for digital cinema implementations, do it, and do it big to reap the benefits. There’s certainly mixed views on Digital Cinema, do we have any witnesses amongst us?
