theaters. One notable example: InTheater Entertainment, a Tustin, Calif., company hoping to leverage the flexibility and low cost of delivering digital content to convince movie audiences to attend events from concerts to corporate videoconferences.
Conventional wisdom has it that it may take a decade to install all the equipment needed to make digital cinema work, so for the moment those jobs in the darkened labs in L.A.'s Studio City are safe. Audience demand could speed that timetable, though. Consider a recent night at the Loews E-Walk theater in Manhattan, where audiences were voting with their feet: Tickets consistently sold better for the digital screening of Shrek (available only in one theater). Audiences prefer it because the digitally created images are sharper. This is good for digital cinema, but Technicolor didn't get a piece of the action; TDC lost out on the movie's contract to George Lucas' THX.
