-By Kevin Lally

For years now, India has enthusiastically embraced e-cinema, the use of electronic projection equipment considered a quality level below that of “true” DCI-approved digital cinema, or d-cinema. But the trends are shifting.

As of the end of October, India’s leading d-cinema provider Scrabble Entertainment was servicing 13 DCI-compliant locations totaling 65 screens running 100% digital with no analog backup. As CEO Ranjit Thakur explains, “In all our VPF [Virtual Print Fee] agreements with the Indian distributors/producers, it is mandatory that we do all screens digital within one complex.”

By the end of 2009, Thakur expects to have in place at least 80 all-digital locations, totaling some 400 screens, with at least one screen in each multiplex 3D-capable. All those screens will be in top “A-Center” theatres covering nine major Indian cities: Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai , Kolkata and Ahmedabad. The circuits participating include Inox, PVR, Fun, Fame, Movietime and Adlabs, and the preferred equipment is Christie projectors and Qube servers.

India’s largest theatre circuit, BIG Cinemas (formerly Adlabs and profiled here), currently has 24 digital-cinema installations, and plans to raise that number past 500 in the next 18 months. “We experimented with e-cinema in 2004 with a rollout of 94 screens, but now we have divested that completely and are going whole hog on d-cinema,” declares chief operating officer Tushar Dhingra. Conveniently enough, BIG distributes digital content to its cinemas through a vast network of fiber-optic cable overseen by its sister company, telecom operator Reliance Communications.

But e-cinema remains a major force in India. UFO India Ltd., headed by Rajesh Mishra, has a circuit of more than 1,250 theatres across India, with 40% situated in the prominently Hindi western part of the country. UFO uses 1.92K and 1.3K projectors, and servers embedded with its own proprietary software. “One hundred percent of the premium Hindi and regional movies have their first-day, first-show release on UFO,” says Mishra, “and all the ‘A’ category producers and distributors who produce such premium content have been regularly working with UFO.”

Although the U.S. studios have rejected the UFO cinemas because they do not meet DCI standards, Mishra argues that “non-studio content owners have quickly understood the economical advantage brought forward by UFO and they have been releasing their movies on UFO screens. In fact, many of these content owners have actually made an optimum use of UFO’s digital revolution by releasing their film in a digital version after dubbing it in multiple Indian languages, which is commercially infeasible to do with physical prints.”
Mishra insists the quality difference is minimal, and that Indian audiences have embraced UFO presentations. “In fact, theatres in the southern part of India have started using ‘UFO screening’ as a key differentiator in their advertising to pull in crowds.”

Mishra says economics is the main factor that will keep e-cinema competitive with 2K digital cinema in India. “The problem is not of having the technology, but of having a viable business model for the DCI 2K technology. The cost of the system makes it unviable. I am sure the studios will realize the futility of insisting on a high-cost system when lower-cost systems can deliver the same quality. The key issue that should be the deciding factor should be the content security and not an over-engineered product which does not give a viable business model. Having said that, we are ready with the DCI offering for cinemas which can absorb the cost of the 2K system.”