CineComm To Distribute Movies By Satellite

A new company, CineComm Digital Cinema L.L.C., plans to deliver movies to theaters via satellite, replacing the traditional practice of shipping reels of film. CineComm plans to bounce the movies off satellites, allowing the cinemas to download them into short-term electronic storage before showing them using electronic projectors.

CineComm, which plans to start distributing first-run movies this way within two years, is led by Michael Targoff, former president and chief operating officer of Loral Space and Communications, which makes satellites and satellite-based multimedia communications systems. Targoff is chairman and chief executive of the new firm.

CineComm plans to use a compression algorithm and data management network supplied by Qualcomm Inc. to transmit encrypted movies that participating cinemas will be able to download to Qualcomm’s theater management system and show with digital projectors manufactured by Hughes-JVC Technology. CineComm will transmit from the original copies of the movies, which will be stored in the theaters until show time, when they will be decrypted and decompressed in real time as they are projected.

Hughes-JVC manufactures digital projectors although not currently used in cinemas. According to QualComm, the quality will be as good as film on the first showing, and unlike those on film, the images will not deteriorate with use. The system will be able to transmit multilingual sound and picture tracks and allow for multiple discrete sound channels of full-bandwidth audio.

The process will also speed up the distribution of film by eliminating the process of transferring movies to film and duplicating them, and save distributors the problem of deciding how many copies of a movie to make.

The company also maintains that this system will help prevent movie piracy, and that it will reduce environmental hazards from the disposal of old film.

(Contact: Christine Trimble, Qual Comm, 619-587-1121, e-mail ctrimble@qualcomm.com; Larry Winokur, BWR Public Relations, 310-550-7776, e-mail lwinokur@bwr-la.com; Alan Brawn, Hughes-JVC, 760-929-5600, e-mail acbrawn@hjt.com)