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Topic: DCDC satellite distribution for a single screen

Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 08-26-2019 12:18 PM

I'm not sure if Barry runs all year round though. We are far south here, but not THAT far south.

My customer has three more screens down the street. But each site has a dish and server. He is first run on all his screens.

Mark

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 08-26-2019 01:33 PM

Also drive-ins tend to book a lot of double features so that would also raise their count of movies.

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
My customer has three more screens down the street. But each site has a dish and server. He is first run on all his screens.

That probably won't work for a comparison either then -- I talked to a friend of mine who has a small chain in western Montana, they have a couple of single screen locations that havd DCDC, but they agreed to install it at the singles due to the numbers generated by the whole chain. (They have 11 locations total and around 24 screens.)

We need to find out if there are any single screen, single locations operations I guess. (If not, we could be a trendsetter....maybe?)

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Barry Floyd
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1079
From: Lebanon, Tennessee, USA
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 08-28-2019 08:42 AM

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
Barry, so I guess the ultimate question is... How many films a year do you book?

Last year (2018) we booked in and played 59 different films. We've played 37 different films so far this year.

We are seasonal, but being in the south our season tends to run longer than the drive-ins up north. Our season runs from the 1st weekend in March until the first weekend in December.

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 08-28-2019 12:30 PM

Barry - did you have to pull any of those off the server to keep for later, or did you play them all within the 4-week window?

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Rick Cohen
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 102
From: Amherst, New York
Registered: Feb 2011

posted 09-01-2019 12:40 PM

I'm not Barry, but he stole my answer to Mark's question, so here goes:

We pull every movie off the server when it's about to be removed after 4 weeks. DCDC sends notices to inform sites when movie files are about to be deleted. If there is any possibility that we may play a movie down the line that we didn't open during the four week window, we pull it off the DCDC server and store it on our own server. We did this with Anna and Midsommer, even though we never played them, and probably never will. They only charge a delivery fee when you actually play the movie. It's mainly a convenience, if you play a movie outside the four week window, they will ship you a hard drive if necessary, but they prefer if you move it off the server before deletion.

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 09-01-2019 04:36 PM

Thanks Rick, that's exactly what I wanted to know.

I don't understand why they are balking due to the "not enough movies" issue when we could easily pull the movies we think we might play off the server.

Maybe the "problem" is the TOTAL number of movies we play... which has ranged anywhere from 45 to 65 movies in a year. The last few years it's hovered in the 40s because we're playing movie movies on the break, and not doing as much stacking.

But there again... they won't give me a magic number to shoot for.

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 09-16-2019 11:08 PM

Well, having just come back from the RMNATO convention and done a bit of networking, I found out from a guy (who shall remain nameless here, just in case it's "privileged" information) that DCDC is looking for about 80 "turns" before they'll let us have the satellite service. There are no options for us paying a little extra for delivery or anything like that.

Considering we have played a maximum of 65 movies in a year's time (and more recently, in the high 40s thanks to longer bookings on the break), I guess we can forget about it for the time being.

I'm tempted to write a letter to somebody about all of this and ask for some sort of solution but I don't know who I would write to.

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Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 09-18-2019 04:01 PM

Maybe you should register as someone else's second location and then announce you've split up. [Wink]

I guess that once you're in, they don't easily throw you out because you did too few turns that year.

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