DTS Digital Cinema and Qube Cinema Form Sales and Marketing Alliance
DTS Digital Cinema and Qube Cinema have announced a co-branding strategic alliance to develop and market numerous digital cinema products including a digital cinema server, a theatre management system, an enhanced digital cinema mastering solution and other allied products. The alliance will bring together the best of both companies’ strengths to form a strong commercial and technology presence in the digital cinema marketplace.
Qube will bring to the relationship, their experience of having developed cutting edge digital cinema products such as the Qube XP-D digital cinema server, QubeMaster Pro encoding suite and the QubeCast media delivery system. Besides providing sales and marketing presence and expertise in many regions around the world, DTS Digital Cinema will lend the partnership experience in developing motion picture technology, such as 5.1 digital surround sound, as well as the content management software knowledge that helped develop their Theatre Management System, Satellite Delivery System and Digital Booking System. Together the two companies will develop numerous digital cinema products, starting with the DTS Digital Cinema DC-20 powered by Qube, a digital cinema server that meets DCI specifications and will be available for purchase in April 2009.
The standards compliant DTS DC-20 digital cinema server, powered by Qube, is multi-format and supports JPEG2000, MPEG-2, Windows Media 9, optionally H.264 and other picture formats, all seamlessly within the same Show, thus making it the ideal choice for integrated feature and pre-show playback. It features a Remote Panel with familiar transport and menu controls for projectionist control and a powerful web-based interface for more advanced functionality over any IP network. An integrated CRU DataPort receiver makes ingest of content fast and easy while front-panel e-SATA and USB-2 interfaces make interconnections much more convenient.
The QubeMaster Pro is a uniquely flexible and powerful Digital Cinema encoding and packaging solution designed to integrate fully into the modern post environment. It is a database-driven, fully software based solution for the Microsoft Windows platform. Highly optimized for today’s high performance CPUs, it is the fastest digital cinema mastering system in the market. QubeMaster Pro has an intuitive and familiar user interface that allows for the one-step pre-processing, encoding, encryption and MXF wrapping of Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs). Qube will integrate DTS Digital Cinema’s proprietary JPEG2000 variable bit rate encoding algorithm into the product to enable users to create vivid DCPs with much smaller file sizes.
A formal management structure with members from both companies has been put into place to oversee the strategic alliance on an ongoing basis. Additional co-branded product offerings to be developed under the partnership agreement are expected to be released by the second quarter of 2009.
Source: DCinemaToday
