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

UK FILM COUNCIL
have limited wider impact in relation to the effort expended, it is important that the UKFC develops a coherent and thought-through
public policy position on the issues involved.
Indicative costs
Standards promotion done primarily through a lobbying website and education initiative would carry costs of about £15,000 for
establishment of a suitable web presence with associated annual technical costs of around £4,000.
Facilitate mastering (encoding), tagging and storage of content
A positive step that could potentially have a major beneficial impact on the market for specialised film would involve taking responsibility
for the ’back end’ of the digital film technology chain: that of encoding and tagging the content to create and store a digital asset.
Standards within this sector are reasonably well established and the UKFC could draw on its experience of the Digital Screen Network to
facilitate this step. Smoothing the way to creation of a high quality digital master, possibly combined with centralised storage of content,
would provide a valuable hub for the distribution of specialised film, reducing the element of duplicated costs involved with players ‘doing
their own thing’. Some economies of scale could conceivably be generated by integrating this step with the back-end mastering processes
already established for the Digital Screen Network. Although apparently a simple step, this undertaking would encompass and address
many of the issues raised in relation to other recommendations. An encoding and digital storage facility would:
• Allow quality control over the digital master
• Aggregate specialised film content in sufficient volume to make it commercially interesting.
• Provide a central and single point of contact for distributors and platforms seeking to diversify their content slate or offering.
• Allow content to be released in multiple formats at different compression rates for distribution across multiple platforms.
• Potentially save costs that would otherwise have to be paid to multiple platform partners to carry out this step.
This step would benefit from being combined with some sort of rights database (as discussed earlier) in order to manage the exploitation
of the content. There is a small danger that such an initiative may alienate some potential platform partners who have a preference for
carrying out this stage of the process themselves, either as a quality control function or a means of generating additional income. The
establishment of this kind of facility would in itself make a positive contribution to the establishment of common standards for the sector,
as discussed above.
Indicative costs
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