Boxoffice - March 219

mark. “We’ve had interest from international exhibition and content-providing
communities,” Blotky notes. As satellite technology improves,
the signal required to deliver content will be available from anywhere in
the world—and, with the tech angle ready to go, DCDC “will have the
lowest cost and the best history of being able to deliver different kinds of
content to different places.” In terms of expansion, they’ll start looking at
“Europe and Latin America, Australia, and probably Asia as well.”
Before they can get to that point, however, DCDC is prioritizing the
optimization of its service in the United States and, later, Canada. That
means, in part, getting to the 8,000 screens they have yet to serve, many
of which belong to smaller cinemas that play second-run films and are
thus not ideally suited to the satellite delivery model.
Of the screens that DCDC does serve, some of them still use the old
“send me a hard drive” model by necessity. These are the “satellite-challenged”
theaters, places where the signal required to deliver content can’t
reach. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re talking about a remote location;
often, theaters in big cities are satellite challenged if they’re blocked
by a tall building. For those theaters, DCDC is working on delivering
files via terrestrial means, like fiber connections or underground cables.
The goal, Blotky explains, is to “become a fully hybridized network”—
one where each site is outfitted with more than one modality of delivery.
But satellites themselves are improving. Various companies and tech
moguls are experimenting with low-Earth-orbit satellites, whizzing past
at around 150 miles above the planet’s surface. These satellites, arranged
in configurations called constellations, “will basically blanket the Earth
within three to five years,” Blotky explains. At any place on Earth, with
the right antenna, a person—or a cinema—can pick up those signals.
That means an increase in the number of cinemas DCDC will be able
to reach.
What it also means is that there will be an increase in the types of content
DCDC will be able to deliver. Just one example—but an example
that speaks to the vast potential to be found in this kind of tech—is in
the area of esports.
Every year in Incheon, South Korea, fans crowd into a 50,000-seat
stadium to watch the world finals of “League of Legends,” a massively
popular video game with players around the globe. Companies like
Ymagis Group and MediaMation have begun investing in video games
as a communal, in-theater experience. The potential—not to mention
interest—is there for fans of esports to congregate and watch competitions
at movie theaters. Once satellite technology evolves, theaters half a world
away from each other will be able to communicate within milliseconds,
enabling exhibitors to take full advantage of this burgeoning niche.
That’s not here quite yet. But with the support of its founders behind it,
DCDC is here to stay. So the improvements will just keep coming, moving
at the speed not of light, but satellites. “It’s fascinating what it is that can
be done,” Blotky says. “We’d love to find ways to create the same kind of
partnerships that gave birth to DCDC elsewhere. It really was the combination
of exhibition and production that’s driven the success of it. My hat’s
off to these guys. They started early on and stuck with it. And it’s worked
out. The next five years are going to be really, really interesting.”
I was a veteran
entertainment lawyer
for a long time before I
went into the industry.
If you tell people that
you’re not going to do
something, and then
you go do it, they’re
never going to trust
you again. And trust is
the foremost thing in
our mind.
MARCH 2019
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