Beyond the movie theater

Coming soon to a theater near you: Not necessarily a movie.

On a recent Saturday afternoon at the Regal Cinemas theater in Ballston, a long line of gray-haired patrons had lined up outside the ticket window, bristling with anticipation and quite uninterested in whatever movie topped the box-office that weekend.

A special re-release of “Cocoon”?

Nope: It was a live performance of Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” by New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, beaming via satellite into a high-definition theater in the corner of an Arlington shopping mall.

More than a hundred other theaters across the country were carrying the same simulcast feed — a feat made possible by digital-cinema technology that has generated sharp growth in “alternative in-theater programming.” That’s industry-speak for such non-Hollywood fare as NASCAR’s Daytona 500, the Tour de France, footage from the annual Coachella music festival and, yes, the opera.

Imagine that: Rather than enticing them to stay on the couch or the computer chair, there’s a digital thingamajig that’s actually encouraging human beings to patronize the movie theaters they are perpetually threatening to desert.

“It’s going very well,” says a theater manager at Ballston Common Mall, which will carry the Met’s performance of Puccini’s “Il Trittico” later this month. “All the operas are selling out. I’d say 80 percent are people who haven’t been to this theater before.”

At last month’s ShoWest, the annual industry showcase in Las Vegas, conventioneers got a taste of the Super Bowl in 3-D, according to Brad Brown, president of the marketing company Brown Entertainment Group. “It’s the Wild West for alternative-media sources,” he says. “Nothing is unexpected anymore.”

Before it became an instrument of mass sports-and-entertainment spectacle, digital-cinema technology began more humbly as a vehicle for pre-feature advertising — still its most profitable platform.

Roughly five years ago, Regal Entertainment Group, the nation’s biggest theater chain, began linking its theaters to a digital network that offers short-form segments, broadcast-television content and other, slicker alternatives to the low-budget slide shows of yesteryear.

A parallel development in Hollywood supplied another piece of the puzzle.

Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), a joint venture of the seven major movie studios, was formed to avoid the mistake the industry had made in the 1990s with three competing, incompatible brands of new digital audio technology — a patchwork system that created headaches for studios and exhibitors alike.

Digital-projection technology, at its outset, had twice that many formats, according to DCI’s CEO Chuck Goldwater, now an executive at Access Integrated Technologies, a Morristown, N.J.-based digital-cinema software and delivery company.

“This was too important a technological transformation for the industry to let that happen again,” he says.

In July 2005, DCI issued a 160-page doorstopper that provides precise technical specifications on how movies should be distributed to, and projected in, movie theaters — with a guarantee that the digitally-produced images will at least match, if not surpass, the quality of 35-mm film.

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