Kodak announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a variance for the sale of licensed Kodak Laser Projection Technology. The variance will only apply towards the design as Kodak has described it. Improvements by licensees will undoubtedly require a separate variance. However, Kodak’s step will be very helpful in obtaining ancillary variances, and could open the door for other laser light sources to get approved for use in projectors. Laser light-emitting devices must be approved by the US FDA for sale in the US due to the potential health hazard that laser light might cause. One would think that laser light sources would not be more harmful to eyes than the emission of a 10KW xenon lamp, but that could take regulators another 10-20 years to figure out.
Barco announced its shipment of the first 4K DLP projector to US exhibitor Cinemark.
While studios pursue the early release of movies to the home through VOD, PriceWaterhouseCooper (PWC) published a report indicating that consumers were more likely to seek pirated content. In a study of Gen Y’rs, “nearly 80% of the respondents streamed movies for free in the past 3 months.” Additionally, the study also found that “consumers would be willing to pay only a nominal amount to view content sooner—no more than $3 to download a movie and less than $1 for a TV program—and it must be within a 30-day window.” In a separate study of online viewing behaviors among a wider segment of population, “many consumers said if they really wanted to see the movie, they would have seen it at the theater.”