No one is better positioned to lead the charge in the D-cinema revolution now underway in the U.S. than Christie Digital Systems.

The Kitchener, ON-based techco has already inked deals to provide its digital projection systems to the likes of Carmike - which operates more than 2,000 theaters in the southern U.S. - and regional American indie chains UltraStar and Emagine, as well as 67 of Galaxy Cinemas' screens in California, Washington, Texas and Nevada.

"This is a big story for us - and I think the country - because we're talking about building a few hundred million dollars worth of projectors here in Kitchener," says Gerry Remers, president of Christie.

In order to facilitate the D-cinema deployment, Christie aligned itself with New Jersey's Access IT (AIX), leaders in the file-delivery business, to form Christie/AIX. The joint venture recently secured a commitment from GE Commercial Finance's Global Media & Communications for a US$217-million senior credit facility to help with their proposed 4,000-screen rollout. The move creates a third-party facilitator between distributors and exhibitors that will bear the capital costs of going digital.

The Christie model, rubberstamped by the major studios, has the manufacturer financing and installing the necessary digital equipment. The movie studios will then pay Christie/AIX a virtual print fee of approximately US$1,000 - likely half of what they'd pay for a release print - for every screen a particular movie title plays on, via cyberspace delivery and a Christie projector.

Over the last year, D-cinema has accelerated due to a convergence of Hollywood's major studios - Disney, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. - into an entity called Digital Cinema Initiatives. The collective had enough clout and cost-saving incentive to jointly issue a white paper on industry standards last July. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers is now voting on the final standards, which are based on the 2K-resolution specification delivered by DCI.

Several of this summer's biggest titles include a digital release component, such as Disney's The Wild, Fox's The Sentinel, Paramount's Mission: Impossible III and Warner's Poseidon. And D-cinema is spreading around the world: Fox recently beamed Ice Age: The Meltdown to a Denmark theater in the JPEG2000 format, marking the studio's first international virtual release.

Locally, Cineplex Entertainment, which controls 64% of the Canadian theatrical market, was unavailable for comment on its D-cinema plans, but it already owns six digitally equipped theaters. It's unknown whether they are DCI-compliant.

"DCI reaching consensus, completing the key testing, and publishing the specification is a significant breakthrough - it shows that the studios themselves agree [on digital cinema]," says Charles Swartz, co-organizer with SMPTE of the NAB Digital Cinema Summit, and executive director of the Entertainment Technology Center at USC, which is helping to test the new technologies through a digital cinema laboratory partially sponsored by the major studios.