Reliance Globalcom Delivers Films Over Fiber

Reliance Globalcom is offering up its fiber optic backbone to major film studios and production houses as a way to globally distribute their content in a way that it says can speed time to market and help studios to avoid piracy.

Adlabs Films Ltd., a fast-growing film production and distribution house in India, has leveraged Reliance's global backbone to send a number of its digitized films to the U.S. In doing so, Adlabs was able to quickly and securely transfer films including Ghajini, Luck by Chance, and Delhi 6 from its digital cinema labs in Mumbai to two of its BIG Cinema locations, in New Jersey and California.

"In the past, the industry would send films by courier, which could take two or three or four days to get films from India to the U.S.," says Ted Rafretto, Reliance Globalcom's president of the Americas. By comparison, the Adlabs films, which could be as large as 2 or 3 terabytes a piece, took as little as five hours to transfer over Reliance's fiber optic network.

Rafretto says that kind of speed could allow movie studios to have faster time to market, which would enable them to better coordinate and synchronize global movie launches and ad campaigns.

While speeding the distribution of films, Rafretto says, fiber optic delivery also lowers the likelihood of a film being pirated. Because the files aren't subject to being handled by couriers, and because they are encrypted during transfer, a film isn't likely to be intercepted and copied before it reaches the big screen.

While Adlabs so far has only used the Reliance network to transfer films to two of its U.S. movie theaters, the company plans to expand that to 166 digital screens it owns in the U.S. market.

By Ryan Lawler, Contentinople