A while back, Sylvain from Quebec wrote in to ask, “Will digital ever replace film?” My response (“yes, eventually”) drew a fair amount of discussion and disagreement, particularly in terms of distribution, with some readers trumpeting film-based technologies such as Maxivision.
An article on CNET today does a nice job explaining how the studios are working to pick a standard for digital video distribution, with the hopes of saving themselves $800 million a year:
A technology consortium called the Digital Cinemas Initiatives (DCI), created by the major Hollywood studios in early 2002, is finally nearing completion on a set of technical recommendations that is intended to rally the industry around a single technological standard […] based on the JPEG 2000 video format.
I think it’s encouraging that they chose the relatively open JPEG 2000 standard, rather than Microsoft’s Windows Media 9.