Case Study: Broadmedia’s Terrestrial Digital Cinema Distribution Using Signiant
Story Highlights
When you’re distributing entire feature films to multiple theaters every week, you need to be able to transfer vast amounts of data quickly and securely. But what if traditional methods such as satellite and physical hard drive delivery just won’t cut it Read this case study to find out how Japan’s Broadmedia worked with us to distribute Digital Cinema Packages over the internet at scale. Every month, Broadmedia uses Signiant technology to deliver 10+ feature films and 20+ trailers to 120+ cinemas.
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Broadmedia is one of the biggest content distributors in Japan, touching on everything from film and television to cloud-based gaming. As their name implies, Broadmedia is firmly rooted in the broadband era and has long been helping guide the industry towards Internet-based distribution technologies and services.
This is especially apparent in Broadmedia’s innovation around the delivery of DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages), the bundles of image, audio and data files that contain the information required for the digital cinema experience that is common in commercial theaters today. DCPs are typically delivered to individual theaters by satellite, or by shipping specialized hard drives via express courier.
But there are challenges with both methods. Satellite delivery is often impractical in dense urban environments and hard drives are prone to failure when shipped over long distances — and neither is conducive to a seamless, fully digital workflow that supports further digital innovation.
Terrestrial broadband delivery of DCPs is the ideal to which the industry has long aspired, but this too is challenging. In addition to the technical issues associated with moving massive amounts of data over IP networks, the content owners (typically Hollywood studios) demand that cinema files be delivered in a highly secure and controlled manner.
Broadmedia was determined to figure out a way to overcome these challenges, and with the use of Signiant technology was able to successfully distribute DCPs over the Internet at scale.
