DTS Digital Cinema and Qube Cinema Form Sales and Marketing Alliance

http://2-pop.com/DigitalCinematography/articlenews/80914

 

March 31, 2009

 

Digital cinema servers and theatre management systems to be part of co-branded technology offerings.

 

Las Vegas --  DTS Digital Cinema and Qube Cinema have announced a co-branding strategic alliance to develop and market numerous digital cinema products including a digital cinema server, a theatre management system, an enhanced digital cinema mastering solution and other allied products. The alliance will bring together the best of both companies’ strengths to form a strong commercial and technology presence in the digital cinema marketplace.

 

Qube will bring to the relationship their experience of having developed cutting edge digital cinema products such as the Qube XP-D digital cinema server, QubeMaster Pro encoding suite and the QubeCast media delivery system. Besides providing sales and marketing presence and expertise in many regions around the world, DTS Digital Cinema will lend the partnership experience in developing motion picture technology, such as 5.1 digital surround sound, as well as the content management software knowledge that helped develop their Theatre Management System, Satellite Delivery System and Digital Booking System. Together the two companies will develop numerous digital cinema products, starting with the DTS Digital Cinema DC-20 powered by Qube, a digital cinema server that meets DCI specifications and will be on display at ShoWest 2009.

 

“The strategic alliance between Qube and DTS Digital Cinema will enable us to bring innovative digital cinema products to market much faster,” said Chris Thomas, CEO and President of DTS Digital Cinema, acquired from DTS Inc. in May 2008. “I can think of no better company to be forming a relationship with than Qube, which has continuously excelled at developing some of the most technologically advanced products in our market at incredibly attractive price points.”

 

Thomas added, “As the transition accelerates from 35 mm film to digital cinema products and systems, our ambition is to replace the historic DTS cinema audio systems currently present on 33,000 screens worldwide.”

 

“In 1993, when DTS launched a pioneering 5.1 surround system that revolutionized digital sound in cinema, the market was primarily focused on North America and Western Europe; that has changed. Today and tomorrow’s markets are global, with exciting growth opportunities in all parts of the world from India to the Far East and China. The decision to put in place a strategic alliance to develop and co-brand products and software solutions reflects this shift in the cinema market.”

 

DTS Digital Cinema will rely on their vast dealer network and sales offices to market and deploy the co-branded digital cinema products. The DTS DC-20 digital cinema server, powered by Qube, will be available for purchase in April 2009.

 

“We are delighted to enter into this strategic alliance with DTS Digital Cinema and believe that it will bring to the theater owner a comprehensive, cost-effective and dependable digital cinema experience. We have great respect for the pioneering work of DTS in digital cinema sound and are confident that this alliance will be much more than the sum of its parts and

bring fantastic benefits to the industry,” said Rajesh Ramachandran, President and CTO of Qube Cinema, Inc.

 

The standards compliant DTS DC-20 digital cinema server, powered by Qube, is multi-format and supports JPEG2000, MPEG-2, Windows Media 9, optionally H.264 and other picture formats, all seamlessly within the same Show, thus

making it the ideal choice for integrated feature and pre-show playback. It features a Remote Panel with familiar transport and menu controls for projectionist control and a powerful web-based interface for more advanced functionality over any IP network. An integrated CRU DataPort receiver makes ingest of content fast and easy while front-panel e-SATA and USB-2 interfaces make interconnections much more convenient.

 

The QubeMaster Pro is a uniquely flexible and powerful Digital Cinema encoding and packaging solution designed to integrate fully into the modern post environment. It is a database-driven, fully software based solution for the Microsoft Windows platform. Highly optimized for today’s high performance CPUs, it is the fastest digital cinema mastering system in the market. QubeMaster Pro has an intuitive and familiar user interface that allows for the one-step pre-processing, encoding, encryption and MXF wrapping of Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs). Qube will integrate DTS Digital Cinema’s proprietary JPEG2000 variable bit rate encoding algorithm into the product to enable users to create vivid DCPs with much smaller file sizes.

 

A formal management structure with members from both companies has been put into place to oversee the strategic alliance on an ongoing basis. Additional co-branded product offerings to be developed under the partnership agreement

are expected to be released by the second quarter of 2009.