Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Digital Cinema = The death of theaters?

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Topic: Digital Cinema = The death of theaters?

Stephen Furley
Film God

Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002

posted 09-18-2010 06:44 AM

Joe,

Realistically, how much bandwidth do you think a typical theatre would need to shift the data in an acceptable time? I'm guessing not a huge amount by modern standards. The download could run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week if necessary, but you'd probably need a link fast enough to be able to quickly download one film to replace a faulty copy, of if the programme has to be changed at short notice for some reason.

Since most of the data is moving in one direction you might be able to do it with the fastest ADSL services, which would be cheap, and you could install multiple ones if necessary.

If you need more than that, it starts to get expensive; you can have just about as much bandwidth as you want, if you're prepared to pay for it. Our Internet connection at work is 100 Mb/s at the moment, but due to be upgraded soon. I can't tell you what it costs, because we don't pay for it directly. We have a similar 1 Gb/s link from our main building to an old school building about half an hour's walk away which we are renting while the main building is being totally gutted and refurbished. The installation, and three years rental for this was 103,000 pounds I think; it was a figure not too far from that anyway. The installation was charged at a certain amount for each end, plus so much per metre in between, then there's the rental for the service for as long as we need it. It was a few thousand pounds per end, plus a couple of pounds per metre for the installation; the rest is the rental charge for the service. It's a far more reliable service than ADSL, it basically just doesn't fail, and you get whatever bandwidth you pay for, but obviously it's not cheap.

The lead time for this service was a few weeks, and installation wasn't difficult, BT had fibre at a location not far from our main building, they were able to run tubing for blown fibre through an underground car park. At the other end the local council, which owns the building, have the main distribution centre for all of their schools, so there is a room there where BT have hundreds of cores of fibre, and the room where we needed it is almost directly above; the engineer didn't even need to blow the fibre, he just pushed it through by hand. Installation time was probably about 3-4 hours at each end.

This service is Ethernet, presented on the customer side of the NTE as copper for 10 or 100 Mb/s, multimode or single mode fibre for 1Gb/s, and single mode fibre only for 10 Gb/s; I don't even want to think about what that would cost.