CJ Interview: Qube Cinema's Rajesh Ramachandran On The Past, Present and Future of Qube Wire

CJ Interview: Qube Cinema's Rajesh Ramachandran On The Past, Present and Future of Qube Wire

Published on Saturday, June 9, 2018

Published in celluloidjunkie.com

One of the products and services that made a big splash at CineEurope in 2017 was Qube Wire, which was just being launched commercially by its developer, Qube Cinema. Some of the buzz around Qube Wire surely had to do with curiosity; both over what the new offering was all about, and why a company like Qube, which had built its reputation as a digital cinema hardware manufacturer, would build a platform for global theatrical content distribution.

Like many, we wanted to learn more about Qube Wire. Since last year's CineEurope we have been given demonstrations of the platform and its extensive features which are geared toward both distributors looking to manage their content assets, including digital cinema packages (DCPs), key delivery messages (KDMs), and rights management, as well as exhibitors who wish to receive and manage digital cinema content, KDMs and device information. (Full disclosure, I'm a partner at Covergent which currently has a commercial relationship with Qube Cinema).

During this same time, Qube Cinema has grown Qube Wire to a point where it is now servicing 127 countries. What this means, as we soon discovered, was that Qube began assisting distributors, independent producers and studios in delivering their theatrical content to cinemas in territories all over the globe. Qube has also been working with exhibitors around the world to update the digital cinema device information in the Qube Wire database, which in turn provides the cinema operator with a publishable facility list message (FLM), more specifically; it provides an FLMx feed, which is the industry-standard protocol for exchanging theatre information. FLMx is based on SMPTE ST 430-7.

If all this talk about KDMs and FLMx sounds confusing, that's precisely why Qube Cinema created Qube Wire. But part of the problem in trying to convey precisely what Qube Wire is and who exactly should be using it, is that when it comes to digital cinema, it covers such a broad spectrum of use cases. According to Rajesh Ramachandran, the President and CTO of Qube Cinema, Inc., part of the reason for developing Qube Wire, was so that its users wouldn't have to worry about three-letter acronyms, or how content is getting delivered or whether keys will be issued for the right devices. Ramachandran and the team at Qube looked at the major issues surrounding the adoption of digital cinema distribution and playback and came up with Qube Wire; a system designed to overcome them.

We thought it would be a good idea to speak with Ramachandran in the weeks leading up to CineEurope to get an update on Qube Wire, a year after its launch. We intended to learn how the service has changed in the interim, what we can expect to see at this year's show and in the near future. As you will see from the following interview, what we got was not only a full explanation of Qube Wire, but a short dive into the history of digital cinema development which lead to the need for such a platform.

For years Qube was known outside of India, its home territory, as a hardware manufacturer. Are you finding it difficult to change the perception the market has of Qube from a manufacturer into a service provider?

A couple of years ago, we changed the name of our parent company in India which provided both hardware and services, from Real Image to Qube Cinema for that very reason. We're now one brand that provides both products and services globally. And as we add more services that we have in the pipeline, this will become clearer to everyone.

What made Qube decide take some of the content and exhibitor services that you provide in India to a global market?

We need to look back at how and why we developed a digital cinema platform in the beginning. Yes, it was clear that we were going to be making servers and products for exhibitors, but back then, there wasn't a distribution system or mastering system available at all. Everyone had their own closed systems at the start of digital cinema. So right from the day that we had our server, we had to have a mastering system and a distribution service because there was nobody else that was providing that.

So, if you look at the three areas of focus that we had - mastering, distribution and products - they are all kind of in lock step with each other. With distribution, in addition to creating the products, we also had to have a services group. Even with exhibition, we grew services - the VPF integration work that we do. If you look at our evolution and our growth and these three areas, we've essentially been a distribution company from the day we've been a digital cinema company. We work on about 2,000 titles every year. Although we may not be as popular as Deluxe Technicolor, we clearly handle far more titles than they have just because of how prolific the Indian film industry is. A portion of those titles get an international release and we have been facilitating international distribution as well. In fact, when we started with Landmark Theatres back in 2005, we had deployed Qube systems to the theatres and the DCPs were made using QubeMaster Pro. The point is, we've been in the distribution space from very early on. As the content and the Landmark network grew, we actually had a mastering and distribution group working out of Los Angeles. It was a smaller operation in LA but the India operation grew bigger and bigger and now has a few hundred people working in the mastering services group now. That's not the world's perception however.

Would you say that the international market, outside of India, isn't fully aware of the full scope of what Qube does as a company?

We didn't actively communi

LINK:	https://www.qubecinema.com/news/cj-interview-qube-cinema%E2%80%99s-raj...
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