</italic>
CISCO INVOLVED IN FIRST INTERNET FILM DOWNLOAD
Cisco systems Inc. will help transmit the first feature film ever
downloaded over the Internet and projected in a theater. Cisco is
providing the data-traffic routers Monday that will speed 20th Centurty
Fox's "Titan A.E." about 2,000 miles from Burbank to computers in an
Atlanta theater. The 80 minute movie's trip over Qwest Communication's
fiber-optic network will take about two hours, after which the
42-gigabyte data file--20,000 times larger than a typical MP3 music
file--will then be viewed with a prototype digital projector. Digital
cinema technology could save studios millions in distribution costs,
industry analysts say.
from the <italic>Atlanta Constitution,</italic> June 6, 2000
The new Hollywood movie ''Titan A.E.'' is being beamed to Atlanta today
over the Internet --- an event being likened to the first telegram, sent
from Washington to Baltimore in 1844.
''It's an absolute first,'' said Larry Lang, vice president of service
provider marketing at Cisco Systems Inc., which is
supplying the digital plumbing for the four-hour Internet transfer of the
42-gigabyte file.
''We expect that when people publish the milestones of digital cinema,
that one of those milestones definitely will be in
Atlanta as the first movie ever delivered down the network to a
theater,'' Lang said Monday. (In 1998, Digital
Projection Inc. of Kennesaw was involved with a digital feed via
satellite of the movie "The Last Broadcast" to five
theaters in Portland, Ore. ; Providence, R.I.; Orlando; Minneapolis; and
Philadelphia.)
With its hundreds of billions of digital ''bits'' of data, "Titan A.E."
(as in ''After Earth'') overwhelms ''What hath God
wrought,'' the message in Samuel Morse's inaugural telegram.
The animated film, set to debut June 16 and featuring the voice of Matt
Damon, will stream across a secure private
network from 20th Century Fox studios in Hollywood to the Woodruff Arts
Center and be shown to a special audience
from the Supercomm 2000 trade show. The movie will travel by way of a
Cisco-equipped Qwest Communications
data center in Burbank, Calif., and a comparable BellSouth site in
Georgia.
Some say digital projection will profoundly affect movies, reducing the
millions of dollars spent on making and shipping
film prints. Theater owners have been hesitant to pay about $ 100,000 per
digital projector for the nation's 38,000
movie screens when most of the initial savings will go to Hollywood
studios.
The elaborate security formula adopted by Cisco, which includes secure
routers and coding the film's data, is aimed at
reducing fears in Hollywood that films will experience the same piracy
concerns that plague the music industry.
Without using the Internet, digital projectors have been used to exhibit
a few Hollywood films, such as ''Dinosaur'' at
select theaters. Other digital screenings have been at festivals,
including the 1999 and 2000 Atlanta Film & Video
Festival and this year's Sundance Film Festival in Utah.
ON THE WEB: For more about the film: www.titanae.com
Gary Handman
Director
Media Resources Center
Moffitt Library
UC Berkeley 94720-6000
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC
"Everything wants to become television" (James Ulmer -- Teletheory)