NATO will hold a 2 hour hands-on accessibility in digital cinema session at ShoWest on Wednesday, March 17th, between 10am to 12pm, in the Ballys South Tower Las Vegas meeting rooms. On display will be assistive listening systems from USL and Williams Sound, and closed caption systems from Doremi, Intelligent Access, and USL, supported by Dolby, Doremi, and Sony servers. Also on display will be standards-compliant GDC and possibly other makes of standards-compliant servers. A similar demonstration will also be held by MPTAC at Show Canada in late April.
Korea-based MasterImage was purchased by California-based Symphony 3D Holdings, which says it will inject $15M into the company. The company has been renamed MasterImage 3D. MasterImage produces a 3-D add-on technology for 3-D sequential frame projection and 3-D dual projection in cinema. The technology relies on a synchronized spinning wheel of polarizing filters, polarized glasses, and a silver screen. Its business model allows exhibitors to purchase systems, as opposed to licensing them.
December 2009 was a memorable month for 3-D. In the span of one week, 3-D’s greatest disaster, and its greatest success, opened in theatres. The greatest success requires no further words. But Larger Than Life 3D, a collection of live music performances topped by the Dave Matthews Band, and distributed by AEG-backed InConcert3D and Cinedigm, was a failure beyond words. The movie was booked for one weekend in over 500 screens, generating a tiny $246K in revenues, or $492 average per screen. With tickets in the $15 range, only 33 people on average attended each theatre over the course of the weekend.
Last but not least, big kudos to Screen Digest’s David Hancock for accurately predicting in the 2006 report titled “Digital Cinema: Rollout, Business Models and Forecasts” that there would be 17,000 digital cinema screens installed by 2010. Now, there’s a man with a crystal ball.
