Dutch digitisation programme agrees way forward

By
David Hancock

August 13, 2010

The Dutch National Film Institute (Eye) has announced an industry-wide collective plan to convert Dutch cinemas to digital projection equipment by mid-2012, managed by a body known as CinemaDigitaal. This central outfit will act as the financing broker, if exhibitors want to go this way. This assumes a guarantee by the government. The total cost of digitisation is put at EUR38.8m ($50.6m), of which distributors will provide 63 per cent, exhibitors 21 per cent and the government 16 per cent. The inclusion of the government brings the distributor split down especially, (generally the distributor is asked to contribute between 75 and 80 per cent in Europe, while the exhibitor contribution is the rest). Plan is agreed by both exhibitors and distributors. There are 755 screens in the Netherlands (including a number of screens not included in the official figure of 675 screens), of which 121 are already digitised to the high-end standard. There are also a number of legacy e-cinema projectors. Not all exhibitors are expected to associate themselves to the plan, and the expected cost covers up to 500 screens (assuming a cost of EUR75,000 per screen to equip).
In the UK, the Digital Funding Partnership (DFP) which is bringing together up to 500 screens owned by smaller circuits and exhibitors in order to digitise them as a single block is also moving ahead with its plans, which are currently at the tender evaluation point.

The progress of the Dutch scheme shows how individual European countries are approaching the issue of the 'digital shortfall', as defined by Screen Digest, which represents the funding needed to digitise those screens that are not covered by a VPF deal, either due to the type of screen or because that European country does not fall within a VPF scheme. The Dutch and the UK have both opted to explore a funding partnership, aimed at a certain number of screens, not necessarily the whole market. However, these are not pure publicly-funded schemes in the traditional sense, with the public sector involved either as a co-ordinating body (such as in UK) or a co-ordinator and using public money to leverage a commercial solution (Netherlands). If it is possible in these two countries, it is possible elsewhere.

Tags:

Countries: Netherlands UK
Companies: Eye UK Film Council