Berlinale launches Keynotes

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Most of the greatest artists are also great visionaries and for the past 57 years the Berlinale has seen a lot of them walk on its red carpet. But cinema's glory comes also from the vision of great businessmen that have shaped and are still shaping the movie industry. Taking this into account, Berlin International Festival hosted this year for the first time a new kind of event called Berlinale Keynotes, a series of speeches and panel discussions about the future of the cinema industry in the digital age. Warren N. Lieberfarb, who had been presiding for 2 decades over Warner Home Video and was dubbed by Variety "the father of the DVD" for his role in shaping the format, analyzed the recent history of distribution and detailed his vision of what the industry will look like in the next 10 years. If in the long run the internet will prevail, in the short run it is not ready yet due to bandwidth limitations among other things. Video already accounts for 55% of all the internet traffic today and the large backbone connections would not handle the huge size of the films distributed to the theaters or to the homes. If we already see new players entering the entertainment industry like Google or Microsoft (companies also represented here at the Berlinale Keynotes) whatever company will dominate the market in the future, the thing that is already taken for granted is that they will always need to tell great stories supported by enticing characters. And for sure, business will need all the artistic talents that our great movie festivals like the Berlinale have been showcasing for so many years.

By Olivier Delesse