It’s hard to resist the temptation to announce projected digital cinema screen growth. Perhaps the most memorable such event was that of Technicolor at ShoWest 2001, where it was announced that the company would have 1000 digital screens within a year. This, of course, never happened. Since then, the bar for a roll-out has gotten higher. DCIP announced in 2007 that it would roll out 14,000 digital cinema screens within three years. While they may have reached Technicolor’s number of 1000 by mid-2009, they most certainly won’t reach 14,000 by end of next year. (Then, of course, there’s the debate of whether DCIP is even involved in the current installations of AMC, Cinemark, and Regal screens. See the section in this report on DCIP for more.)
The worldwide number bandied around today for digital cinema installations is an impressive 12,000. A significant percentage of this growth occurred due to the popularity of digital 3-D. Overall, worldwide digital screen count doubled in 1