CineEurope is the big cinema conference for Europe, held in Barcelona each June. There is a real mixture of people and companies represented at the event. I have written four articles about CineEurope, one each for Sony, Barco and JukeBox along with this more general overview and highlights of what I saw.
There were a number of key themes which came across in the seminars, the importance of Event Cinema content to cinemas, the importance of PLF (Premium Large Format, such as Imax) and finally the importance of the ‘Experience Economy’. All of these themes can be summed as being about high end cinemas, which are more than just multiplex auditorium and do more than just sell standard coke and popcorn. This is about appealing to a wider audience and also increasing the per head spend.
The above themes can be seen just a small selection of the seminars which took place over the whole of the CineEurope event. These are just three of those, that I attended:
Coca-Cola Seminar: Growth in the Experience Economy: This seminar was presented by Presented by Corinne Thibaut, International Director, Cinema & Leisure, The Cola-Cola Company & Enrique Burgos, Digital Manager, The Coca-Cola Company and was an interesting look at how the cinema fits into the new ‘experience economy’, be it one off events or just making the whole experience of going to the cinema more interesting, but not simply adding a glass or wine to an entrance fee. There was a very similar take on this topic with the Cinemas’ Position in the Experience Economy The Move to Premium, Driven by Innovation seminar which looked at “Experiences”. Finally the third session I attended was Cinema Retail – Tips and Tricks for Revenue Growth: This session was presented by Matthew Ezra, General Manager Premium F&B, Hotys Cinema Australia who went through how he had borrowed from other forms of retail to enhance the quality of the Food and Beverage offerings that were provided in the Hoyts cinemas in Australia, including adopting the MacDonalds system of being server at the till by one member of staff and then collecting from elsewhere.
CineCarz, are a company which will allow to put a message onto the big screen in an automated way. The idea is “a dedicated fun message of approximately 30 seconds from one customer to another both in the audience. It runs for approximately 30 seconds during the pre show. it is a DCP package that is delivered directly to your servers and projectors.” The idea is that you can wish someone a happy birthday or smilier, by filling in the template details via the website and then that is automatically created as a DCP and sent to the TMS. CineCardz have been working with Arts Alliance Media. According to the advertising the price is ‘Free’ to the exhibitor, but with a ‘expected’ revenue of €3,000 per year per screen.Seats – there seemed to be more seat manufacturers on the trade floor than anything else. The variety of design of a cinema seat was immense, there were easily a hundred different designs for you to consider, if not more.
Laser – it was all about laser again this year. Manufactures had all improved their products and were offering a variety of different projectors or retro fit kits to allow cinemas to go to laser, selling the reduced cost of ownership as one of the main benefits.
cinedigital Manager: As you wonder around the trade floor at CineEurope you often dismiss some of the stands as ‘just another’ x y or z. I nearly did the same with the cinedigital Manager stand, thinking that it was just another remote management TMS application, but I am glad that I stopped and experienced a demonstration of the system that they were working on.On the surface cinedigital manager is indeed another management piece of software, but I think that it has a lot of clever features and integration which helps make it more interesting than some of the other competitors on the market. The idea is that you are able to manage all aspects of your cinema or cinema circuit from within one interface, as the application integrates with different aspects of the theatre. You are able to do the usual things such as create playlists and schedule them, along with the scheduling of any of the display systems which maybe in place for promotional material. You are also able to access the servers and projectors directly for each of the screens. There is a facility to include a link into a CCTV camera so that auditorium or other areas of the cinema can be monitored via the software. There is some thought included around managing the actual DCP content and KDM management.
However, one of the aspects which made this product different from other similar ones, is the ability to create and schedule non-sync playlists for use in the auditoriums. A clever use of a Raspberry Pi connected into the auditorium sound processor allows for appropriate non-sync to play before each show and to change depending on the exact content which is happening at any one time. The other clever design with this application is the coded caption system, which allows customers to use their mobile phones to view the subtitles of a film via a combination of the original subtitles on the DCP and a wifi hotspot.
Another useful aspect is that the software also allows for basic DCP content to be created. Aimed mainly at just creating simple pre-show ads, it is a simple case of uploading the images, selecting some basic options and then overnight while the system is quite a DCP is created and even added to the appropriate playlist if so required.
Unfortunately the website doesn’t do the product justice and does not provide as much additional information as one would wish for, however, it possible to download a two screen version of the software from the website along with the manual.
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