The film and entertainment sectors are finally starting to embrace developments in IT to manage distribution and control piracy, writes Karlin Lillington

It has been one of the slowest and most reluctant of industries when it comes to technology, but the film and entertainment sectors should be dramatically transformed in the coming years by innovations in the way that content is created and distributed.

Setting aside the rapid growth in using computers for increasingly breathtaking animation and for post-production - the editing and visual tweaking that gives coherence and extra sparkle to a finished movie or television programme - Hollywood hasn't changed too much since the early part of the last century, when it began working with reels of films and physically sending those reels around the world to be shown to audiences.

But, according to IBM, which has a research and development arm that focuses on the entertainment industry, that's all about to change.

What, one might ask, is IBM doing flirting with Hollywood?

In the mid-1990s, under the leadership of chief executive Lou Gerstner, IBM began reshaping the technology giant to focus more on business markets than pure information technology. Entertainment was clearly a market in waiting, says Steve Canepa, the Los Angeles-based vice president for IBM's global media and entertainment industry division. "The film industry is one of the last industries to embrace IT at core value production," he says.

As IBM looked at what was happening with the growth of the internet and the management of digital information, "we thought the entertainment world would lead because digital content is really the currency of this industry".

Instead - thanks to fears about piracy in particular - the industry has moved more slowly than expected to take advantage of developments in IT that it also sees as potential risks and challenges.

But the balance is shifting, says Canepa, as technologies become increasingly compelling and can also help to manage and control distribution and tackle piracy.

In addition, some earlier moves towards new technologies were stymied by being proprietary and therefore expensive and controlled by gatekeeper companies owning the technology.

The move towards standards based hardware and software, the development of open-source software like operating system Linux, and the acceptance of media industry standardised formats (such as mpeg), have pushed down the costs and thrown open the doors to rapid innovation.

A good example, says Canepa, was hardware manufacturer Silicon Graphics, which first developed the computers, software and know-how for creating computer animation.

That served the industry well for a decade or so, but the arrival of Linux changed everything, says Canepa.

"We went into Pixar [ the makers of Toy Story] and they couldn't spell IBM," he laughs. "Within 90 days, they were working on Linux and, literally within 18 months, the industry had shifted over to this standard."

Suddenly small firms - as Pixar Studios was then - saw development and equipment costs dive and techniques quickly improve. "Developments in the industry are no longer gated by the R&D spend of a single firm. Now, they're based around the advantage of an open architecture," says Canepa.

Storing content is one of the big developments, he says, especially in the area of digital cinema.

"There's a big movement to replace the architecture that has served us for 70 years, reels of film and analogue 35mm projectors." Now, more and more movies are stored digitally and end up in cinemas through satellite distribution, stored on hard drives or on linear tape.

IBM has a new technology that works somewhat like a digital eight-track cartridge (for anyone who remembers those) - except it holds 800GB, or two feature films, on a highly portable and very robust 4in by 4in cartridge.

Canepa also speaks about the "velocity of change", the pressure bearing down on the media world to get content into numerous different formats, for simultaneous broadcast, digital transfer or download, for example.

"You can't do this manually," he notes. "There's an incredible need to automate and streamline this media flow."

The latest trend in computing - service oriented architecture (SOA), where software is called up to suit a given need automatically - is one answer to this drive, he says.

A general reluctance to grapple with such notions - leaving it to the IT department - is changing in the entertainment and media sectors, he says, with management increasingly involved in the transition.

Different geographies are moving at different rates of change, he notes. Europe has been ahead of the US in many area of digital broadcast technologies, while India, where few people have cable but hundreds of millions own mobile phones, is more interested in mobile technologies.

Oddly, the entertainment industry's laggard status when it comes to IT is probably now benefiting it, Canepa notes.

"One thing that plays in its favour is that it is only now making its transformation and the transition [ in new content creation and distribution models] is happening anyway, so it's a good time to introduce something like SOA," and new investment in IT.

He finds his own job - and the extra insight he gets because he is married to a television producer - deeply satisfying.

"It's an incredible time to be working for an industry like this, going through such an incredible transition and the rate and pace of this transition is only going to accelerate."