Really-Big-Screen TV

[Gregg Lengling]

The multiplex goes digital, showing live sports, concerts--and lots of ads

By Ramin Setoodeh
NEW YORK--On a Wednesday night last month, fans trickle into a Manhattan movie theater. They sit back in plush seats and get ready for the feature presentation: a live soccer match between the Colorado Rapids and the Los Angeles Galaxy. "Don't forget the popcorn!" barks an announcer in California, over a satellite link.


Coming soon to a theater near you: sports, rock concerts, and other spectacles new to the silver screen. Regal Entertainment Group, the nation's largest theater operator, is investing $70 million in digital projectors for about 4,900 screens, along with equipment for transmitting and storing digital content. The technology has made it into theaters before the movies it was designed to show. For now, it's used mainly to screen high-resolution TV-like shows--and extensive displays of pre-movie ads.

Eventually, digital will displace what is still an essentially 19th-century technology. Films will be film no longer: They'll be compressed files beamed to digital projectors by satellite or distributed on disks. Experts say digital cinema will drastically cut distribution costs. "This is the biggest technological advancement in the industry--perhaps only rivaled by the invention of sound," says John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theatre Owners.

But digital projectors still can't match the color range of conventional equipment, and the movie studios haven't agreed on a standard format for digital movies--or put to rest their fear that the digital files will be stolen and shared on the Internet. All that has delayed mainstream digital movies. But Regal, which owns United Artists Theatres, Edwards Theatres, and Regal Cinemas, hopes to have a jump on competitors when Hollywood does go digital.

Screen test. In the meantime, "we want to train the audience to see there are other things to do at the theater," says Kurt Hall, Regal's cochief executive. Since last autumn, a handful of theaters have broadcast live college football, screened a recorded Christian rock concert to sellout crowds, and featured the documentary Ghosts of the Abyss, along with an interactive question-and-answer session with director James Cameron.

One kind of content is a sure bet. Digital is an ideal format for ads, making them cheaper to transmit and update and allowing theaters to tailor the ad mix to the audience. In many of its theaters, Regal already cranks up its new digital projectors to show 20 minutes of ads and promos before a conventional projector takes over to screen the movie.

At the soccer match, the audience is sparse--just a dozen fans--but some of them felt it was worth the $12 ticket, the going rate for a movie in Manhattan. "It's not like watching a game on TV at all, because the sound is so incredible," says Mat Doyle, a 26-year-old playwright from Brooklyn, N.Y. And best of all, he adds, "the screen is so damn big."