What’s a Hollywood digital home opening aimed at the movie industry without a Hollywood notable to help show it off? Probably just an interesting concept. But the digital home Intel opened January 18 in Santa Monica – featuring a computer downloading movies, music, and television shows and sending them from the Net to the other media players – has a partner in Revelations Entertainment, co-founded by actor Morgan Freeman.
By his own admission Freeman is anything but a techie (“a technological idiot” is how the actor described himself), but he did say he knew digital delivery was so much a wave of the future he was all but required to learn how it works. "I don't think it takes that much of a genius to understand technology is changing our world and moving ahead very quickly," said the actor known best for roles in Driving Miss Daisy, Unforgiven, and The Shawshank Redemption.
Freeman co-founded Revelations Entertainment with producer Lori McCreary, who said the digital home shows the company out in front of innovation. Intel desktop platform group general manager Louis Burns said the home presentation begins “a conversation as to how technology affects entertainment and what technology is going to do to the industry.”
Part of the idea was to help get Hollywood more comfortable with content protection devices and software in personal computers and other media players, Burns added, in light of the movie and music industries’ war against online copyright piracy. "Both companies recognize that consumers want to go digital, first with music and now with film," said Freeman of the Revelations-Intel digital house partnership. "Our task is to make film easier to buy than to pirate."
The digital home, which the partners call the Open House, displays all the digital entertainment options consumers enjoy while paying content owners for legitimate use.
The home’s living room, the partners continued, features a computer with high-definition video and 7.1 high-definition surround sound, and transmits material to other media players in the house by way various online services to protected formats. The products displayed for the demonstration, Revelations and Intel said, are either available now or will be in the near future.
