http://www.techradar.com/news/video/the ... al-1216603

Wouldn't notice the difference myself, but it would explain why WoWS didn't appear in some cinema listings here.

There will be cost savings for the studios as they will be able to distribute the movies to everywhere at the same time. So hopefully an end to region coding on films.

Regional coding has nothing to do with production techniques, and everything to do with DVD sales and markets though.

An inevitable move, I suppose.

It is a way to screw over some markets and stop disks being imported from cheaper regions. The fact that digital distribution could allow opening in all territories at the same time there is no guarantee it will happen. With the fact that they can only get the stars to one country at a time will still mean that they need to plan around that for premieres in each region.

Star Wars director confirms he won't go to the digital darkside

http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of- ... ax-1216672

The choice of stock for film makers is very narrow now - I remember Spielberg and Lucas complaining about it once. If you want to get a certain film look, eventually it’s got to go through some kind of post production - which means digital these days.

It might also be cheaper to add such effects post production as well?

Probably - though purists will want to have as much done in the camera as possible.

But isn't that more snobbery than for technical reasons?

This story is only about digital distribution.
There will still be films shot on film and distributed on film, it's just that Paramount has decided to stop distributing on film.
We don't yet know how this decision will impact the creation of the film - I strongly suspect that production won't be going all-digital just yet.
In a declining market, it makes more sense to distribute your films on a medium that costs around $100 for digital distribution compared to $2,000 for print exhibtion.

Mark

I actually think that digital distribution might actually be close to zero. Some time ago there was a report about Bit Torrent offering to create an encrypted network for the distribution of movies. I wonder if this is what they will be doing?

A couple of friends 'in the biz' reckon The Pirate Bay might be paving the way for a terrific bait and switch. It's just a question of the studios working out how you monetise a torrent based system. There's a generation of people who are completely at ease using torrents, so it makes sense to exploit that if you can. It's also a great indicator of what the great unwashed want; instant market research.

It is probably a more reliable indicator than many other methods.