Telecom bets on film Downunder

By PETER GRIFFIN

Telecom is going out of its way to pick up business from the Australasian film industry as the telco gambles on the sector being a big earner for it in future.

A small unit within Telecom International has been set up to deal with the film production companies as Telecom sells more broadband services to production companies shooting films here and in Australia.

Hollywood producers making "runaway" movies in New Zealand need to get their digital daily footage back to studios in California for editing and executive sign-offs. That's where Telecom comes in.

Telecom business development manager Michael Greig said the production houses needed connections operating at a minimum of 10Mbps (megabits per second) and were sending upwards of six or seven gigabytes a day of production footage.

In addition to sending footage to the US and London from Weta Digital in Wellington for the Lord of the Rings and to the US for The Last Samurai, which is shooting in Taranaki, Greig said Telecom was working for four productions in Australia, a film of Peter Pan among them.

"Peter Pan is being shot on the Gold Coast. We're sending [dailies] from the Warners lot there back to Revolution Studios in Los Angeles," he said.

Telecom's Australian business, AAPT, has fibre optic cables into several of the production houses along Australia's Gold Coast and can link directly to Los Angeles over its capacity on the Southern Cross cable.

Using its own infrastructure and leased capacity on other cables, Telecom claims it has a network reaching 70 production houses. A partner, Media.net, provides software for delivering pre-digitised files and editing work in progress.

"It's very much in the development stage. We make our money internationally on our corporate customers, our voice and internet business. This is a niche, but one we see worthy of development," Greig said.

Naturally, Telecom mirrors the local film industry's view that the Government needs to provide tax breaks to foreign production companies so that more runaway productions are lured to New Zealand.

"It's a fickle business, it could all just go away. We could have literally nothing on that network, but we've taken a risk position in believing that this industry will scale up," Greig said.

Telecom had made progress with film industry clients in Australia because it was prepared to be flexible, he said.