Rise of Digital

As far as the major studios and distributors are concerned, digital technology offers great potential to increase profits and dangers in equal measure. Digital distribution will certainly transform the film industry more than any previous technological change since sound. Once it becomes the norm to download film via broadband, the potential for a new form of ‘blanket distribution' is obvious—not only do you no longer need multiple prints, you can also bypass the cinemas (although the big screen offers a separate experience that is likely to remain attractive).

Digital film has the advantage of offering identical versions of the film to each viewer, and this will without doubt save billions of pounds at the distribution phase. Despite the 'hype' over piracy and the digital enabling of this illegal activity, industry commentators believe that one advantage of digital distribution will be control and security, as most piracy is the result of a cinema-goer with a hidden camera distributing a poor quality version of a film to parts of the world where it has not yet been released (because the prints are currently somewhere else). Simultaneous global distribution via the internet will put an end to this 'time gap' and thus its exploitation by pirates. One issue for debate is about the quality of digital movies. Whereas some film makers and critics argue that the 'binary reduction' of images in the digital compression process reduces the complexity of image and light, it appears that just as music in MP3 comes without the parts that the human ear cannot hear, so digital films remove the degrees of texture that most viewers wouldn't notice anyway.