It's the end of the road for physical film. Distributors have declared 2013 the expiration date for the celluloid we've enjoyed for a century.
"The sun is setting on celluloid quickly," said Stuart Bowling, the Worldwide Technical Marketing Manager from Dolby Laboratories.
Holdouts -- largely independent and art houses -- have a narrow window to invest in a digital projector, even a digital box office.
"The box office is a touch panel. The audience walks in, goes up to the TV, taps on it, swipes their credit card, picks the ticket up and then goes into the movie theatre that now no longer has a projection booth," said Bowling.
You heard right, the projector hangs from the ceiling. All of these changes can be seen at the new escape cinemas from India. His Dolby Laboratory stands at the crossroads of all this change. Recently the San Francisco company took theatre sound from 5.1 to 7.1 Dolby surround.
"With new formats like 7.1 we can now bring sound off the screen to the sides of the audience for the first time. A cinema in the near future, and we've done a lot of experimentation on this, will have the ability to put sound over the audience," said Bowling.
And in front of the home audience the display maker Sharp promises the world's largest, highest resolution LCD, 16 times the pixels in your HDTV.
Even with all the tremendous change, a technologist is allowed to get sentimental.
"The colors that we get from there and just the look of shining a light through that medium and then projecting it onto a screen, we all have those dreams and fantasies where we're just looking for that moment of entertainment, make me laugh, maybe make me cry and just hat sheer amount of joy you can get from that 90 minute to two hour experience," said Bowling.
