Audio Video News

Information and entertainment technologists have long predicted that reels of films will eventually disappear, replaced by digital datastreams delivered straight to theaters. On June 6, the first such event took place---from Los Angeles to a theater in the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta.

The animated space adventure Titan A.E, scheduled to open in theaters on June 16, was sent from Qwest Communication Inc.'s CyberCenter in Burbank over the Cisco 7140 Virtual Private Network and was stored on a massive hard disk drive at the receiving end. The film was beamed onto the screen by a Barco/Texas Instruments DLP Cinema digital projector. The event was part of the Supercomm trade show taking place in Atlanta.

Several news stories mistakenly claimed that the film was transmitted over “the Internet.” Cisco’s network boasts a rate of 10 Gigabits per second, far beyond anything possible on the Internet. Even so, the transmission still took two hours. Pacific Bell conducted experiments with the digital transmission of films in the early 1990s, but Titan A.E. was the first one fully encoded for ATSC high-definition video.

"Such cutting-edge applications . . . not only revolutionize movie creation and distribution, but will drive innovation in myriad other industries as well," said Cisco vice president Larry Lang. "Just as the Internet has enabled industries of all kinds to increase flexibility, decrease costs, and explore new opportunities, digital cinema has the potential to bring great benefits to the industry." Fox and Cisco officials said this was the first time that high-speed digital transmission and high-definition storage and projection processes have been combined.