BBC digital media questionnaire pits moguls against revolutionaries

Here's an interesting series of questions and answers from the BBC, which asked film industry personalities how movies will be different in the digital age. The field of questions ranges from "Will fans choose how they want to watch films?" to "Did the VCR hurt the film industry?" What's most interesting about these answers is that most of them aren't really answers. Dan Glickman, who heads the MPAA, gives the most non-ny of the non-answers, saying the decision to release films digitially is a "company by company" choice. Wow, thanks for the wisdom there, Dan. Naturally, the theaters owners have their own strong opinions on the subject, while the head of the British Video Assocation and Curt Mavis of CinemaNow are the only ones who speaks the truth: simultaneous release on a wide scale will happen once digital technology becomes more pervasive.

Beyond the issue of whether theaters are doomed, the BBC also gets some good dish on why DVDs are region encoded - the bane of every hardcore anime fan in the United States - and why more films don't receive simultaneous global release. Check it out.