More Than 300 Screens Earmarked For Emerald Isle
Irish Republic To Go
100% Big-D By March
DUBLIN, Ireland – The Republic of Ireland intends to convert all of its cinemas to digital projection by next spring, the Irish Film Board announced in late March.

The nation is expected to become the first to equip every one of its movie auditoria - more than 300 in all – with the “big d” digital projection technology approved for features by Hollywood’s major studios.
This puts the IFB on a faster track than the United Kingdom Film Council, which announced weeks earlier that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would have 250 of their more than 3,000 screens converted to “big-d” by late 2006 [In Focus, May 2005].

Investor consortium Digital Cinema Limited Ireland, led by privately held Avica Technology Corp. of Santa Monica, Calif., is instituting the $50-million conversion and will assume the responsibility of installing digital storage servers, players and management software along with NEC projectors equipped with Texas Instruments’ DLP Cinema technology.

Avica will also build and operate a satellite distribution system to deliver content to theatres, with the reported estimated cost approaching $100,000 per screen.

By the end of 2006, the activity in Ireland and the U.K. is expected to give Europe a “big-d” screen count of more than 600 screens, more than any other continent. By contrast, there are fewer than 100 public “big-d” auditoria in the United States.