Feasibility Study of a Digital Platform for the delivery of UK ... - BFI

UK FILM COUNCIL
There is the potential to consider integration of the requirement for a digital master with the mastering element of UKFC’s digital cinema
Digital Screen Network (DSN) programme in some cases. A central repository could serve both projects. Indeed, even at a less
integrated level, shared technical standards for compression and metadata would be very beneficial.
It is unlikely to prove cost-effective for the UKFC to consider the establishment and ongoing management of a repository for digital
masters as an in-house project. The capital costs of such a project would not be insignificant. Assuming a target of 500 films, the capital
costs of an uncompressed repository would likely be between £750k and £1 million. The capital costs of an MPEG set up would most
likely be measured in the low hundreds of thousands. However, added to this, the operational requirements of the business stand well
outside the core competencies of UKFC. Thus, such a venture would likely be best handled by a franchised third-party in a similar manner
to the DSN.
There are a number of organisations in the market – highlighted elsewhere in the report but including BT, Entriq, Narrowstep, Ioko and
others as well as content delivery companies - who lease and rent the equipment and skills required to maintain a central repository.
Regardless of the chosen delivery partners for any consumer service, it is likely that such a contract would need to be established.
It is difficult to be precise on costs as a number of different business models exist depending on whether the provider is involved in the
end delivery of films to the consumer. In general, however, the following aspects of the service are chargeable:-
• Initial encoding (if the master is not digital) – charged per minute. This is often known as ingest.
• Storage of data – charged per GByte on a monthly or annual basis
• Tagging and metadata – charged on a time basis
Other services (such as transcoding, media delivery, DRM licence serving, etc) are often provided as part of the same contract. These
are discussed in more detail below in the appropriate section.
Transcoding
Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion from one encoding scheme, such as Apple Quicktime, to a different encoding
scheme, such as MPEG-4, without returning the signals to analogue form. In other words, it is the process of turning a film formatted to
be delivered on, for instance, a walled garden TV-based Video-on-Demand service, into an appropriate format for use on the open
Internet, or on a particular mobile phone.
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