By Mark Schubin

Just before the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas, a group of producers, television-equipment suppliers, and talent representatives were scheduled to discuss such issues as projection technologies in movie theaters.  It was not, however, at NAB's Digital Cinema Summit, co-produced by the Society of Motion-Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and the Entertainment Technology Center.  It was, instead, at the nearby Sports Video Group (SVG) Chairman's Forum.

Why would sports producers be concerned with movie theaters?  Perhaps it would be best to begin at our genesis.

In the beginning, John Logie Baird created the first recognizable television image of a human face.  It was almost without form, and darkness was upon it.  So the inventor added light and saw that it was crude.  It was the first day of the Age of Videography.

That was in 1925.  Two years later, corporate media got involved.  Bell Telephone Laboratories demonstrated their version of television.

Actually, it was two versions.  In one, the viewer looked at a small screen in a box.  In the other, viewers sat in an auditorium and viewed a much larger screen flanked by drapes, as in a modern movie theater.

By 1930, four more versions of theatrical television had been demonstrated, by Baird, General Electric, RCA, and Western Television.  The ad for Baird's version inaccurately called it "The World's First Public Performance of Television in a Theatre," but it didn't even need to say what would be seen on the screen.  The idea of seeing anything on television in 1930 was reason enough to buy a ticket.
    

Of course, on that 1930 cinema-television screen, "anything" might have been mistaken for almost anything else.  In the 2,358-seat auditorium, Baird's TV screen was just 30 inches wide and offered a single scanning line for each of those inches.  Each pixel consisted of a lamp mechanically switched on or off.

Theater television improved rapidly.  By the 1936 Olympic Games, more than two dozen special television-viewing rooms were equipped with electronic projectors generating four-foot pictures, variously reported to have had between 180 and 375 scanning lines.  Two years later, a British company called Scophony was offering video-projection systems for home or theater, the latter filling seven-foot-wide screens with 405-line pictures.

Also in 1938, Paramount Pictures invested in television-developer DuMont Laboratories with the specific purpose of furthering theatrical television.  Ten years later, they publicly demonstrated, at the Paramount Theatre in New York, a version of an "intermediate-film" process shown by Fernseh AG at the 1933 Berlin Radio Exhibition.  A continuous loop of film was coated with emulsion, exposed to a video signal, developed, projected, washed, and re-coated to start again.  Picture quality was hailed as "nearly the equal of newsreels," according to "Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States," by Douglas Gomery and David Bordwell (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

Paramount was not alone.  Fox, RKO, and Warner also worked on theatrical-television systems, and equipment manufacturers made deals with exhibitors as well.  U.S. News & World Report noted in 1949, "By 1952, most important theaters are expected to be equipped with television screens."  Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theatre Owners of America (and owner of 153 cinemas), predicted in 1950 that all cinemas would soon install coaxial-cable connections for live feeds, according to "Movies at Home: How Hollywood Came to Television," by Kerry Segrave (McFarland, 1999).

Also according to Segrave, however, only 16 U.S. cinemas had been equipped for theatrical television by late 1950, and, according to Gomery and Bordwell, by 1951 all cinemas in the Balaban & Katz chain had canceled plans to install theatrical-television facilities because revenues did not justify the cost.  The concept of live newsreels was superseded by television news, and, according to Terra Media's Cinema-television chronology (www.terramedia.co.uk), by 1952, despite improved projection technologies offering full color and sharper pictures, fewer than 100 U.S. cinemas were equipped for large-screen television.

In part, the failure can be attributed to the other display technology demonstrated by Bell Labs in 1927, small-screen home television.  Why pay to go to a theater to see what can be delivered for free at home?
    

Even when the programming shown on theater-television screens wasn't available in homes, however, it still wasn't very successful.  In 1974, William Leggett reported in Sports Illustrated on the theater-television carriage of the much-touted boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire the previous week.  "It is estimated that 1.9 million seats were available in U.S. theaters for the fight," he wrote, "and that nearly two-thirds of them went unoccupied."

Why, then, did the topic come up again this month at the SVG Chairman's Forum?  One reason might be 3-D.

Stereoscopic technology is being viewed in many quarters as a panacea simply waiting to be applied to any ailing sector of the moving-images business.  Are movie theaters suffering from poor attendance?  With 3-D, proponents say, box-office numbers will rise.  And, what works for movies must surely work for sports, too, mustn't it?

Writing this month in Videography sister publication TV Technology, columnist Jay Ankeney covered 3-D ads on this year's Super Bowl.  He closed with comments on the 3-D presentation of the final Bowl Championship Series football game, which he viewed at a famed Hollywood cinema:

"Most of the reviews of last January's BCS championship game presented in 3-D in 82 theaters around the country have reflected the enthusiasm of the companies behind that experiment.  Yes, it utilized the robust RealD polarized 3D process and despite some technical glitches the depth effect was impressive for an early attempt at a live broadcast.

"However, when I witnessed the event at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood -- despite the fact the game was tied at the end of the first half and the sold-out crowd had plunked down $21 for a ticket -- when the third quarter started, less than half the seats were filled."

Perhaps the Hollywood audience was more interested in the 3-D technology than the game.  Perhaps some found the 3-D presentation made them queasy or gave them a headache.  There are many possible explanations for why audience members departed before the conclusion of the game and another large number for why they might have bought their tickets in the first place.

"Television pictures in theaters will, initially, at least, have the strong appeal of novelty," wrote Alfred Goldsmith, in "Theater Television -- a general analysis," published in the Journal of the Society of Motion-Picture Engineers in 1947.  The same might be said of 3-D.

Perhaps that's why 3-D isn't the only aspect of theater television on the agenda of this month's SVG event.  There's also opera.  Opera?

The Metropolitan Opera has been transmitting its productions live in high definition to movie theaters around the world since 2006.  Contrary to Goldsmith's prediction, the Met's theater-television audiences have been growing rather than declining.  Contrary to Ankeney's finding, the Met's theater-television audiences stay in their seats not only through the opera but also through the bows, the credits, and even the copyright notice.

It might be the case that opera lovers are more fanatic than sports fans (the SVG presentation is called "The Fandom of the Opera"), but that seems unlikely.  It might also be the case that the Met has discovered some differences between ordinary videography and videography for theater television.

Consider just sound.  Both home theaters and movie theaters have surround-sound systems, and they're both sometimes said to be 5.1-channel (left front, center front, right front, left surround, right surround, and low-frequency effects).  But they're very different.

In a typical home-theater setup, the left-surround and right-surround speakers will be placed behind the viewers.  In a movie theater, there are also often surround speakers behind viewers.  But every speaker visible in a movie theater auditorium is a surround speaker, including the ones in front of much of the audience (the main left, center, and right front speakers are all hidden behind the screen).  So, even ignoring such issues as reverberation times, a home-theater surround-sound mix is not optimal for a movie theater.

Then there are the relative speeds of light and sound in air.  Both are very fast -- faster than passenger jet aircraft.  In a home theater, they might effectively be considered instantaneous.  But they're not.

Light travels about 300,000 kilometers per second; sound travels at just over a thousandth of that speed (and varies with such factors as temperature and humidity).  In the world's largest auditorium, the light reflected from the screen will reach all viewers' eyes within a tiny fraction of a frame, but in even a relatively small movie theater, someone in the last row might hear dialogue a frame or more later than someone in the first row.

That's not necessarily a problem when the visual is a wide shot.  People have learned that distant sounds take time to reach their ears.  But, as its name suggests, a close up appears to reduce the distance, with sound expected to match.

Then there are viewing angles.  Home screens, be they small TV sets or giant wall screens, are all viewed more or less head on.  In old-style cinemas without balconies, almost everyone in the audience looks up at the screen.  Even in modern movie-theater auditoriums with "stadium-style" seating, most viewers still look up at the screen, and almost no one looks down.

If what is to be shown on the theater screen is shot from low angles, it will match the audience point of view.  If it's shot from above, it won't.

Extreme close ups and fast cutting work well on the tiny screens of mobile devices.  In movie theaters, they can be nauseating.

Do you leave the room when a commercial starts on your home TV?  In a movie theater, that's not so easy.  Still, lengthy events like baseball games and operas usually do require audience breaks.  The audience ideally needs to be informed that a break is happening, told how long they have until its over, and kept entertained should they choose to remain in their seats (or return to them before the break is over).

Even something as ordinary as the end of the event is not necessarily simple in theater television.  A movie has a fixed and known duration.  Neither a baseball game nor an opera is so well timed.  So, when it finally ends, the multiplex's projectionist might be busy elsewhere.

Common practice at the end of a TV show is to fade to black.  At the end of a live theater-television event of unknown duration, it actually makes more sense to fade to white, providing sufficient light reflected off the screen for comfortable audience exit.

There are many more differences between home TV and movie-theater TV.  Perhaps that's why next month the Metropolitan Opera will receive a Peabody Award for using "state-of-the-art digital technology to reinvent presentation of a classic art form."  Earlier this year, the Met received an Engineering Emmy Award "for advancing technology through ongoing live transmission of high-definition programming to movie theaters worldwide."

Perhaps strangely, imperfections in picture and sound quality don't seem to matter as much to theater audiences as they do to those at home.  Consider a review by Albert Goldberg in The Los Angeles Times of one early live Met transmission to cinemas, which noted those imperfections but nevertheless called the event "little less than breathtaking."  It was published in 1952.