Different nights at the movies
3:08pm Tuesday 22nd August 2006 in News By Anna Youssef
CINEMAS in Bolton could soon become entertainment venues offering gambling, old movies and big screen games.
Digital projectors are set to shift movie distribution away from traditional 35mm film.
And that would mean cinemas being able to play anything from a computer - from website feeds to DVDs.
According to Vue Cinemas, one of which is based at Middlebrook, Horwich, this will begin to change the way cinemas operate.
It could also lead to cheaper prices since shooting on film is expensive and distributing the typical 10,000 feet of film for traditional cinema projections is also dear.
Instead, films would be delivered on a hard drive, containiing 100 gigabytes of the latest Hollywood fare, as a digitally-scanned copy of the master film print.
Lottery funding was granted in May last year for the installation of a digital projector at Cineworld in Astley Bridge, one of 200 in the country, placing that cinema at the forefront of the technology.
Vue Cinemas in Bolton has already experimented with non-movie content, showing England's World Cup matches during the summer on the big screen.
Steve Knibbs, of Vue Cinemas, said the full potential of the technology has yet to be seen.
"With a digital projector you can input virtually anything into it," he said.
"We can screen a DVD, a clip downloaded from the YouTube website, gaming from a digital projector with multiple players on the screen at the same time, a live feed from satellite, cable and whatever.
"Anything we can get as an input we can put up on screen.
"That means we go from being a place where you can just see 35mm films, to becoming a general entertainment place providing everything from gambling to gaming, educational lessons to movies people might not have seen for 40 years."
Two years ago there were only 335 digitally-equipped cinema screens in the world.
By the end of last year, in which Hollywood finally agreed a common technical standard, that number had nearly trebled to 849 screens.
Forecasts predict 17,000 screens will be converted in just a few years from now as cinemas try to entice people away from watching movies on DVD in their own homes on their home cinema set-ups.
