WOMEN IN DIGITAL
Sandrine Remy
XDC Area Sales Manager
Belgium

I feel my contributions to international marketing both in the international fashion business and most recently in digital cinema exhibition have benefited from my MA in Economics coupled with the four languages I speak.

Being interested in new technologies and how they would impact on cinema with the advent and the future potential of the D-cinema, I started with XDC in January 2006.

By a long lead, XDC is the leading digital cinema service company in Europe. It offers technical and financial customized solutions to the cinema business and all the necessary related services distributors and exhibitors need to show motion pictures flawlessly and securely.

XDC offers exhibitors a wide range of technical (2K projectors, secure servers and integration components) and financing (rental, leasing or selling) solutions. Moreover, XDC offers full logistical services for distributors, including digital content preparation (encoding and encryption), delivery, and quality control and archiving. At the time of writing, 16 January 2007, over 200 movies have been processed by XDC Content Servicing Laboratory.

I fulfil the role of Area Sales Manager for the Southern and some Northern European countries. I see these markets as very promising because of the quantity and quality of their production. My responsibilities include the business development and sales of our services to the exhibitors. I ensure contacts are followed up, the presentation of the XDC Business Proposal and, most importantly, make sure contracts are signed. Coordination and ensuring that our local integrators comply and carry out their work according to XDC’s stringent quality guidelines are also part of my job. Preferred system integration partners are essential. They know the language, the way of working and the local characteristics of their territory. They enable XDC to accelerate the progress of its business approach.

Even in these emancipated times, outside the US and the eastern European countries, women are still underrepresented in technology industries. At the beginning, I have to admit that it was not so easy to prevail in a male dominated area, but the innovative challenge which is digital cinema and my strong personality have enabled me to integrate into this hitherto male sector.

XDC has a very important digital market share in Europe, of the order of 80 to 85%. However, it is necessary to see these figures in an overall context because, even though significant, our almost 300 screens in comparison with the 18,000 screens in the prospective countries are not that many. And because of this, my role is more educational than ‘pure business’.

One of our major assets is certainly the quality of our services and the experience our team possesses. We have developed some essential tools to facilitate digital deployment. Probably one of the most important is XDC’s Network Operations Centre that allows direct communication with projectionists all over Europe and the remote control of the server and cinema automations systems.

We work every day to make digital cinema a concrete, reliable and advantageous solution for the cinema industry and I help exhibitors make it possible.

Digital cinema is a revolution, but “coming soon” to your screens too…

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