How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love The Cloud: Exhibition/Distribution Technology 2020

by Jeffrey Winter

Sometimes revolutions happen with a bang, sometimes with a whimper. More often they arrive in stealth mode; one day you look up and is everything is different…just not quite the way you thought it would be.

Ever since 1) I have worked in film exhibition/distribution and 2) there has been an internet, there has been one shimmering vision on the horizon… that 1 & 2 would fully merge and the physical formats and pipelines of so-called “print” delivery would merge seamlessly into the digital data flows of the world wide web. Simply put: no more 35mm prints, no more VHS tapes, no more DVDs, Digitbetas, HDCAMs, or suitcase sized DCPs. No more trips to the post office, Fed Ex forms, tracking numbers, fretting about customs and worrying whether a snowstorm would screw up the print delivery and cancel the screening. Most importantly of course, none of the hideous and often prohibitive costs associated with all of this, that can heavily weigh down the distribution balance sheets. Simply put, something akin to distribution heaven.

Sometime in 2019, it dawned on me that after many years of twists, hiccups, re-visions and rude awakenings, the future wasn’t just the future anymore. We have finally arrived at the moment where a working draft of end-to-end digital distribution/delivery is actually in place, in rough-cut form. It’s certainly not the push-one-button, send-a-film-over email nirvana I had imagined; instead it’s a hodgepodge of file formats, myriad cloud-based services, and calculations around uploads/downloads, storage space, and piracy considerations. But it is happening and it is wonderful, with tremendous upsides and seemingly negligible negatives other than an investment of time, technical education, and reasonable precautionary practices.

Allow me to throw some numbers at you. Every year, The Film Collaborative books and executes a few thousand screenings of our films at public venues such as film festivals, theatrical venues, universities, community centers, etc. For many years now, we have been tracking the formats we show at each booking, and analyzing the data to show how the exhibition formats are evolving. It should be noted that not all of the factors are in our control, regardless of what formats and delivery services we OFFER to a venue, THEY have to have the willingness and technical capacity to receive and show it. So, as an industry made of up many players and technical capabilities, we evolve together.

Consider the following change between bookings in October 2015 and October 2019. We typically use the month of October for purposes of analysis because it is reliably one of the busiest months of the year, so the data holds the most statistical significance.

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Let’s look at just 2015 versus 2019 for a moment:

Exhibition Formats: 2015 vs. 2019 (2015/2019)
total October bookings = 279/249*
Bluray: 123/83 bookings (44%/35%)
DVD: 24/4 bookings (8.6%/2%)
Physical DCP: 109/58 bookings (39%/24%)
Digital Tape Formats (HDCAM, Digibeta etc): 0/0 bookings (0%/0%)
Apple ProRes (Physical HARD DRIVE formats): 8/1 bookings (2.7%/0%)
Digital Download .MP4 FORMAT: 15/51 bookings (5.7%/21%)
Digital Download DCP Format (cloud service download): 0/43 bookings (0/18%)

*note: 9 of the Oct. 2019 bookings required no deliverables because the venue already had the film in house from a prior booking, either in physical or digital format.

Of course, in all the data, the physical versus digital delivery comparison stands out well above the rest…

• In 2015: entirely digital delivery was in its infancy at 5.7% of 279 bookings in a 31-day period.
• In 2019: digital delivery rose to 39% of all bookings in the same 31-day period.
• In 2015, digital DCP delivery was not even something we discussed, and all digital delivery was made via .mp4 downloads sent either through direct download from a website or, mostly, though DropBox links.
• In 2019, we delivered 45.75% of our total digital downloads as standard DCP files made available from an Amazon cloud based storage service, and 54.25% of all digital downloads were sent as .mp4 download links shared via Dropbox.

Looking at this dense array of formats, stats, delivery systems and storage spaces, it seems safe to revert to my pervious assertion: we have certainly not yet arrived at the push-one-button, send-a-film-over email nirvana we might once have imagined. I now currently suspect that we never will, and that was a fundamental misunderstanding of how distribution systems and broadband technology could ever work…in much the same way the flying cars in the Jetson were an absurd vision given the contemporary reality of 2019 urban traffic patterns.

And that, my filmmaking friends, is just fine…and definitely heading in a good direction!

In looking at the current data points, we clearly see that physical formats have not turned into dinosaurs, or at least not yet. A lot of that is due to residual resistance from both festivals and filmmakers, especially the most established ones. Most big film festivals, especially in the United States (we have always been the furthest behind in digital cinema in the U.S. for reasons associated with government funding structures and de-centralized infrastructure), still see digital delivery of their films as risky and substandard, and perhaps even not worth the time and energy since they can get filmmakers to deliver at their own cost. Indeed, a majority or festivals and screening venues ask for PHYSICAL BACKUPS to digital delivery…which on some level is patently absurd since once a venue downloads a film they literally have a pristine copy that can be duplicated and is just mirrored by the physical backup, which is much more susceptible to damage, loss, etc. Also…there are still plenty of smaller venues and grassroots venues, especially at universities as well as in countries with less robust broadband, that are not yet set up for internet delivery of film yet (though this is rapidly changing).

Just as significantly, many filmmakers who have been around a while still worry that internet delivery makes their films less safe, and are reticent or slow to give us full access to their pristine digital files. In analyzing the October 2019 data, it is critical to note that one well-performing film that premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and was peaking in October festivals refused to allow us ANY access to digital files, even forbidding us from creating an emergency digital back-up to send over if the physical format failed or did not arrive! As such, the percentage of the October bookings in digital delivery would have most certainly been higher had we not been denied access to the film’s digital assets, perhaps as much as 10% higher.

It should also be noted that while digital delivery has tremendous upsides, it is also much more complicated and technical at the outset. Burning Blurays in a lab is arduous but compressing a file to decent exhibition specs and making it small enough to conform to DropBox capacities is no simple matter either. We at TFC have only been able to achieve successful digital exhibition capabilities through years of exploring technology partners and services, and amazing staffers who understand far, far more about bits and bytes than I ever will. And you’ll have to spend a lot of time prepping the films for delivery to those technology partners too.

However lest this all starts to sound frightening to filmmakers, let me list some of the ways that embracing digital exhibition has greatly enhanced our business and our sanity.

1. Enormous savings in time. No, we can’t just attach a movie to an email and hit send. However, once we’ve uploaded a film once to the cloud, it’s mostly just as simple as messaging a download link to the venue (my print traffic colleague assures me that it is at least a bit more complicated to work with large files stored with Amazon Web Services). The fact that we can service a booking of four films in in Bratislava in 30 seconds by just sending an email with four links is miraculous. Multiply this by many dozens of bookings across a month, the time saved is breath-taking.
2. Enormous savings in shipping costs and resources. Although the data above shows that the number of digital bookings was generally less than 50% of the total, our shipping and duping costs for the associated business quarter was actually more than 80% less than normal! At first, I was so shocked by this reduction in cost, I genuinely freaked out and assumed we had lost a huge number of our receipts! Upon closer examination, it became clear that by having digital delivery as an option, we were able to convince the venues that would have required the most expensive shipping to switch to digital receivership, and also we were able to adjust the distribution supply chain to save money in many places, especially from labs. NOTE: I generally draw the nerd/wonk line once I start using words like “distribution supply chain,” so enough about that for now. However, discussion of resources is critical…and not just in terms of saving money from duping. Obviously, any significant reduction in duping of plastics and use of carbon-based fuels associated with shipping has a tremendously positive and feel-good effect on the climate science of it all, even if I cannot offer you numbers to prove that.
3. Huge reductions in stress and emergencies. One cannot overestimate the fact that now we have emergency digital backups that can resolve any sort of delivery/exhibition snafu. Throughout the entire history of film exhibition, there has always been the worry that a print will malfunction, or a delivery truck won’t arrive on time, etc. That has resulted in many a week, weeknight, or weekend filled with panicked calls and crisis management. Those days it seems, are very nearly gone, and good riddance.

To close, it should be stressed that there are lingering questions as to whether digital delivery of films makes our intellectual property less or more safe, and if filmmakers and distributors should worry how piracy will evolve to take advantage. It is important to note that for as long as there have been physical formats, especially following the decline of the all-35mm supply chain with the introduction of video, there have always been those who will figure out how to a pirate a film, regardless of format. The internet at least offers passwords, analytics, tracking, and geo-blocking that are a far cry safer than sweatshops in Asia copying DVDs smuggled out of a lab.

I, for one, have not seen any data to suggest piracy is on the rise due to digital cinema, and am open to re-evaluation should I see some. However, for now, I have learned to stop worrying so much, and hope the rest of you can see clear to join me at this exciting new juncture.

admin January 28th, 2020

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