cine.net Records Million-Dollar Bonanza
2 July 2004
Australia has positioned itself to earn a greater share of work on blockbuster movies such as Lord of the Rings and The Last Samurai with the launch of a super-fast broadband network to link Australian post-production and digital content companies with Hollywood studios.
South Australia's Minister for
Education and Children's Services and Minister for Tourism,
the Hon. Jane Lomax-Smith, representing the premier, today launched cine.net , the 21st Century broadband network that has delivered a payback from day one by underpinning millions of dollars in business for the South Australian film industry.
cine.net has already enabled a massive increase in business for leading Australian visual effects specialist Rising Sun Pictures. Last year, the super-fast network assisted the Adelaide-based company to win prestigious post-production work for Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. The multi-million-dollar company has doubled in size in the eight months it has used the network.
cine.net is a generational leap beyond ADSL. With Internet connection speeds as fast as 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), cine.net is able to transfer massive film files from Adelaide to LA in a matter of seconds. It allows Rising Sun Pictures to transfer an average of 60 Gb of data each day - equivalent to more than 90 compact disks - to meet the needs of its Hollywood-based customers.
Rising Sun Pictures director Tony Clark - one of the cine.net founders - said the digital revolution in film had opened up the studios to delivering post-production work anywhere in the world. "Producers shop around for the best suppliers," he said. "Nowadays Hollywood regularly looks beyond the post-production facilities that had clustered around its studios during the 20th century.
"cine.net gives us the ability to compete globally, letting us meet a client’s needs better than our rivals in the US. cine.net now makes these world markets accessible for any Adelaide company creating digital content."
cine.net is a specialist network that was conceived to provide a cost-effective service for screen media production, post-production and digital content. It is designed to assist film producers, editing facilities, visual effects providers, sound facilities, DVD producers and games companies.
Enabled with substantial support from the State Government, cine.net was designed to assist these companies to serve national and international clients with super-fast, burst-usage oriented broadband. Inaugural customers include Rising Sun Pictures, The Kojo Group, the Adelaide Motion Picture Company, the SA Film Corporation and Integrity Data Systems. The network will also allow a new era of collaboration, potentially making Adelaide an integrated full-service post-production facility.
Cine.net project construction and network management is provided by licensed carrier, Agile Communications, which has leveraged its national Tier-1 broadband backbone into the cine.net project. Agile managing director and cine-net co-founder Simon Hackett said cine.net created the first true 21st century broadband service in SA. " cine.net is way beyond residential technologies like ADSL and is now in the hands of the industry best able to use it to its full potential," he said.
cine.net addresses the specific needs of screen media companies by offering a range of connection options, at 2Mb per second (Mbps), 10Mbps, 100Mbps and 1Gbps. It also provides low-cost data exchange between Adelaide and Sydney.
Cinenet Systems, the company that runs cine.net, is a not-for-profit organisation that is committed to reinvesting surplus cashflow into providing better services and lower subscription costs, ultimately benefiting Adelaide’s growing digital economy.
For further information about cine.net, see the cine.net website at http://www.cine.net.au/
