Sony takes on the digital age
By Adam Maya
Tony Beswick
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“We delivered three-and-a-half hours of content to Singapore in four hours,” beamed Tony Beswick, vice president of operations and technology at Sony Pictures.
Welcome to the 21st century of delivery. In April, Sony announced it would be transitioning all its content from tape to file-based distribution. What exactly does that mean?
For one thing, now that Sony took over distribution of the MGM Pictures library, it means having almost half of Hollywood’s movie catalog available for instant access—to watch, as Beswick says, “what we want, when we want, anywhere we want it.”
Using a software system called a global ordering library database, Sony is able to manage all its physical and data files and put them onto a server.
Other recent developments at Sony include the portable Playstation, which makes it possible to be listening to music while either playing a video game, watching a movie, taking a picture or even ordering a pizza. By 2006 Beswick says Sony will be releasing a movie player similar to an iPod featuring a 500-movie database to download from.
Sony expects the change from analog to digital to cut its annual film distribution costs of $1 billion by 40 percent. Similarly, it will increase efficiency and reduce wasted time.
“Imagine that you’re finishing production on a feature,” Beswick says. “You now need to edit it, add languages to it and then deliver it to a duplication facility to make thousands of tapes. Now fast-forward to being able to take those files, load them into a computer, put your audio into the system and output those files in a matter of hours instead of weeks. That’s why Sony moved to a file-based infrastructure.”
No longer will Sony be worrying about sending tapes to a film processing lab to be color-corrected. File based media is going to become compulsory, says Beswick, adding that data can be captured at 2K and 4K resolution, equal to the resolution of a 35mm camera, which is what Spider-Man 2 was scanned at.
“It means no more dirty film, no more dirty prints, no more negative scratches. In a theater, imagine it gets played once, three times, four times. It’s been handled so many times. Once we’re able to produce product out into the digital cinema environment, we’re as good as the original product, time and time again.”
Beswick says Sony is in the process of transferring a terabyte (1,024 gigabytes) of content a day. But what about security? How long will it be before someone taps into Sony’s database?
“It’s virtually impossible to hack into,” said Beswick, who noted that Sony is capturing its files with 128-bit encryption, the highest level allowed in the Unites States. “(But) anything’s possible. All it takes is one individual. Encryption and security is the most difficult part about this. How is this delivered? Is it delivered via satellite? Is it delivered from a hard drive to a screen? Is it delivered across IP? There’s a lot of questions; there’s not a lot of answers. Our biggest concern is security.”
Soon, the concept of video on demand will be the standard for home viewing, said Beswick. Already, Sony and Oscar winning director Steven Soderbergh have agreed to release his next five films simultaneously through theaters, TV and the Internet.
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