Digital Domain Media Group, which announced last week that it would start demanding royalties from companies in the business of stereo-3D filmmaking and exhibition, said Mumbai-based Reliance MediaWorks is the latest to sign a licensing deal for DDMG's technology patents.
Reliance follows in the footsteps of Prime Focus World, which licensed DDMG's technology for 2D-to-3D converison services, and Samsung Electronics, which licensed it for use in consumer electronics. The addition of Reliance to the stable is unsurprising, since DDMG is already partnered with Reliance in Mumbai and London VFX production ventures.
DDMG says it owns six U.S. patents related to "the original commercially feasible computerized process" for 2D-to-3D conversion, involving rotoscoping and horizontal image displacement and transform. "The current 3D feature film business is principally dependent on image capture and image creation, either the proprietary technology of native 3D camera pioneers, such as the Cameron Pace Group, or the 3D stereoscopic conversion pioneers of In-Three/Digital Domain," said DDMG Chair and CEO John Textor in a prepared statement. "We look forward to an increasing financial participation in the growing 3D industry that we helped to create."
Textor has good reason to look forward to a robust, wide-ranging revenue stream based on the patents DDMG purchased when it bought In-Three, along with its proprietary "Dimensionalization" process, back in 2010. Despite his protestations that the company is undervalued, DDMG stock has been struggling on the market since it was offered at $8.50 in an IPO last November. As this article was published, DDMG was trading at just $4.53.
In other DDMG news this week, the company said it hired Oscar-nominated VFX supervisor Jim Berney, formerly at Sony Pictures Imageworks in New Mexico, to head operations at its Florida studio, and former St. Louis Cardinals executive Tim Hanser to recruit sports clients as customers for DDMG digital productions. Watch examples of DDMG's work for the New York Mets at the website.
