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“We are in the midst of a technical innovation, because we are moving away from satellite and into fibre technology. Quite simply, we want a bigger presence and we want to provide great product.”
BBC, followed by a spell at the facilities house TVI, where he happened to man- age the Disney and Sony accounts.
Now, of course, “me and Michael [Eisner] are very good buddies,” he says, laughing.
But it’s not been a totally smooth ride. “We were pioneers in the begin- ning, because we were the first ones to use the PetaSite storage system,” Rutkowski remembers. “And it was a huge challenge, because it was very expensive and very new. Now every- body uses it.”
He won’t divulge exact numbers, except to say: “the market was not as buoyant as we expected. This was
mostly because it was set up to pro- mote digital rollout on the network, which means you need a digital decoder to receive us. There aren’t as many as we anticipated.”
“96% of people in Holland get their television through cable,” he continues, “but some of the distributors don’t have digital rollout as yet, so at the moment, there are about 100,000 digital decoders in the whole market. That said, the penetration rates have exceed- ed our expectations dramatically.”
It’s nothing to worry about if it continues in the same way as American premium cable channels HBO and Starz, early versions of
which it resembles. They don’t as yet feature original programming, but who knows what’s in the future?
Remarks Rutkowski: “We are in the midst of a technical innovation, because we are moving away from satellite and into fibre technology. Quite simply, we want a bigger pres- ence and we want to provide great product. There are very few places that are just dedicated to movies all the time. We have about 360 new movies a year. Sky run at half that.”
Ga zoo door. That’s Dutch for “keep up the good work” for all you non-linguists. ■ BEN FALK
Photo main: Cinenova TX at Ascent Media; above left: Cinenova MD Alexander Holland; third from left: Wojtek Rutkowski; inset left and above; Poster campaign
Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video • Exposure • 11