21815 - SCTE Broadband Feb2023 COMPLETE v3

8 Vol. 45 No. 1 - February 2023 Issue Before I started working at the SCTE, some of you might know I was in the film industry, working for Disney and Paramount Pictures, and after 10 years in 2009 that led to consulting with the Royal Opera House. I helped them set up an internal distribution division for something new they were working on: opera and ballet broadcast live by satellite into cinemas. How amazing! I was hooked. Delivery by IP was still a twinkle in the eye of most content producers in the early 2000s; it was by hard drive or satellite in the main. The overlap between this industry and that one is obvious, especially at IBC, where I bumped into a lot of old friends, but it was a chance conversation with Simen Frostad from Bridge Technologies who made me realise maybe this story is interesting to SCTE members at large. I loved my time at the Royal Opera House. Our offices were backstage. What a treat it was to share the elevator with mezzo sopranos and prima ballerinas in costume, hearing arias belted out a few feet away while we were all at our desks. This work led to freelancing for other providers of this content, but it was hard work back then. Selling the concept to cinemas was tough; it had never been done before. Finding tickets for La Boheme online was challenging, if you even knew it was happening. For a nascent little sector like ours it was equally hard to find out practical details like release dates, box office numbers, growth projections, and even who your competitors were. There was a community out there, it just needed connecting. In early 2012 I had a weird premonition that my life was about to change, and a few weeks later I had a lightbulb moment. I realised we needed a trade association; we needed all of the above plus a name to hang all this marvellous stuff on. I bounced the idea around with a few people and the appetite was certainly there; before I knew it I had appointed a Board of Directors and a President. The ink was barely dry on the Articles of Association when Event Cinema Association launched in September 2012, and by September 2015 we had 250 members from 20 territories worldwide including the British Museum, Odeon, Universal and the RSC. It all happened so quickly. We had two key objectives: to promote and support the event cinema industry, and to that end we produced conferences and awards events, released trailers into cinemas worldwide every quarter, a technical best practice handbook, slate days and networking events. Most importantly we produced industry reports with Omdia every two years, giving the industry credibility for the first time, attracting investment, growing the market. We also partnered with Comscore to gather event cinema attendance and box office data which was a real milestone, giving distributors, exhibitors and content producers alike the visibility to see what worked and what didn’t at the box office. Jobs with titles like Event Cinema Manager started appearing in the Guardian; academics were producing lengthy essays. Even Frances Ford Coppola wrote a book on the subject. I found myself on BBC Radio 4, being interviewed by the national press, delivering speeches and appearing on panels at film festivals. We were making our mark. It was an exciting time and the industry itself was riding the crest of a wave, records being set and broken every few weeks; big names like War Horse, One Direction, Billy Elliott, Dr Who and Take That were waking cinemas up to the possibilities of offering premium content to senior audiences Event Cinema Association 10th anniversary by Melissa Cogavin scte news