BRUSSELS (Thomson Financial) - Broadcast equipment manufacturer EVS said its unit XDC has signed agreements with Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Paramount Pictures Corp., Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. and The Walt Disney Studios to invest up to 600 million euros in the deployment of up to 8,000 digital cinema installations in Europe.

The roll-out period under the agreement - which will see more than 65 percent of the value of projectors, servers, applications and services being co-financed -- will last for a maximum of 5 years, with each digitised screen co-financed over a period of maximum 10 years.

The group also said agreements with two other studios, Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures are in a very advanced stage and are expected to close shortly.

'These agreements mark and ease the beginning of the large scale deployment of digital cinema in Europe,' EVS said.
'For XDC, the next steps are the negotiation of comparable agreements with European movie distributors, the sale of this co-financing proposal to cinema exhibitors across Europe and finally, both equity and debt raising to fund the digital roll-out phase'.

EVS also said the infrastructure deployment will also help XDC to develop its other activities - the design and sale of cinema servers and software applications, the installation and maintenance of complete digital cinema systems for exhibitors and digital content processing and distribution services for movie distributors and advertising sales houses.
XDC chief executive Serge Plasch said: 'We are very happy to announce these milestone agreements which offer European exhibitors a viable business model to convert their screens to digital cinema.'

EVS said there is a global potential of 35,000 screens to digitise across Europe.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited...fx5042332.html