“Fibre optic transmission of digital cinema benefits all stakeholders in the value chain: cinemas, distributors, producers and service providers,” is the view of Patrick von Sychowski, chief operating officer of Adlabs Digital Cinema, which is an independent service provider of digitised cinema to film producers and distributors. “Delivery takes six to eight hours over a 100 Mbps connection in multi-cast mode. That is much faster than door-to-door for a hard disk drive.”

There is also little chance of a film not reaching the theatre in time because a flight was cancelled or heavy rain interfered with the satellite download of the film. Though in the early stages of the commercial pilot, HDDs were sent as back-up, Adlabs reports zero failure in the film arriving intact. “Only if a road is dug up and the optic cable damaged, would you not have the film arrive in time at the multiplex,” he says.

“Reliance has laid over 80,000 kms of 48 core fibre in India which means the hard work has already been done for us and we simply have to connect the last mile (usually meters) from the switch or the street to the multiplex,” says Sychowski. Remote areas like Kashmir and Assam have less coverage, he says, but there are also fewer cinemas there.

One of the big lessons from this year’s experience is that sending large fibre packets from point A to point B via fibre optic is relatively easy, but enabling each link for multicasting is much more problematic, says Oswald Soans, network operations manager for Adlabs Films, necessitating configuration of the routers as well as application and network management software.

Adlabs’ appetite for bandwidth is enormous and RCom, which was doling out 10 to 20 Mbps to the average business customer, was challenged to quickly provision up to 100 Mbps. In the next phase, Soans wants the operator to scale up to 1 Gbps.

The virtues of vertical integration notwithstanding, Adlabs still had to bargain and negotiate for a favourable commercial arrangement. Reliance charges a one-time fee to connect up each cinema site and Adlabs Digital Cinema then pays a monthly lease on the line, the cost of which it recovers in the form of a premium transport charge from film distributors and savings on airway bills by not having to insure, secure, send out and then retrieve the HDDs.