XDC Signs Digital Cinema Deployment Agreements with Warner Bros, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox and Disney

Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (“Warners”), Paramount Pictures Corporation (“Paramount”), Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (“Fox”) and The Walt Disney Studios (“Disney”) will support XDC, acting as a Deploying Entity, in order to roll out and fund digital systems for theatrical presentations in several countries in Europe.

Under the terms of the agreements, Warners, Paramount, Fox and Disney have independently agreed to co-finance the future deployment of maximum 8,000 DCI-compliant digital cinema installations in 22 European countries. The roll-out period under the agreement shall last for a maximum of 5 years while each digitized screen shall be co-financed over a period of maximum 10 years. Those agreements are co-financing more than 65% of the value of digital exhibition systems made of projectors, servers, applications and services, for a maximum estimated global investment of EUR 600 million.

These agreements mark and ease the beginning of the large scale deployment of digital cinema in Europe. For XDC, the next steps are the negotiation of comparable agreements with European movie distributors, the sale of this co-financing proposal to cinema exhibitors across Europe and at last, both equity and debt raising to fund the digital roll-out phase.

This infrastructure deployment will also help XDC to develop its other activities: first, the design and sale of cinema servers and software applications, secondly, the installation and maintenance of complete digital cinema systems for exhibitors, and thirdly, digital content processing and distribution services for movie distributors and advertising sales houses.

The agreements with Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures are in a very advanced stage and will be closed shortly. There is a global potential of 35.000 screens to digitize across Europe.

Source: FOX Business