Studios sign deals to install Digital Systems for movie projection.

GET ready for a digital upgrade at the movies--finally.

L.A.-based Technicolor Digital Cinema, a division of Thomson S.A., has signed deals with several major studios, including DreamWorks SKG, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros., to install digital cinema systems in 5,000 theaters across North America over the next two to three years.

Technicolor also is in late-stage talks with Twentieth Century Fox, New Line Cinema and Weinstein Co.

Digital projection services run between $90.000 and $100,000 per screen, with Technicolor financing the equipment and installations and receiving a fee each time a feature is shown. The studios will pay about 80 percent of the fee and exhibitors will shell out the rest.

Technicolor will coordinate the equipment installation and maintenance. About 250 digital cinemas will be installed by the end of next year as a pilot program. The rest of the 5,000 units to be installed over the next two years, said Joe Berchtold, president of electronic distribution services at Technicolor. The eventual plan is to install 15,000 screens over the next 10 years.

Currently, exhibitors typically pay for their own 35-millimeter projector, which runs about $30,000 per screen, and "those can last forever," according to Berchtold.

There's been talk of a digital upgrade for years, but format and costs have held things up.

Positive ID

The U.S. State Department just finalized a requirement that all new passports come with RFID chips, or radio frequency identification. The chips, which can be read from a range of several inches to a foot or two, are supposed to streamline the customs and immigration process, as well as cut down on forgeries.

Los Angeles-based Oberthur Card Systems Inc., a division of the French conglomerate Francois-Charles Oberthur Group, was one of four companies competing for the RFID contract with the Government Printing Office. Critics of the RFID chips say that personal information can be read too easily, but technology companies insist that the chips can be made secure. The regulation takes effect next October.

Early Signal

Amp'd Mobile, the much-hyped mobile phone network targeting the hip, the extreme-sports-crazed and the young, has launched an advertising campaign--even though the service won't be out until next year.

The L.A.-based company is funded by $67 million in venture capital, and so far it has launched only a Web site. The mobile network promises customized handsets, cell phone service, games, video episodes of extreme sports and other all-encompassing youth-lifestyle-culture offerings. The slogan of the campaign is, "Try not to die, Amp'd Mobile is coming."

In the Chips

L.A.-based private equity firms have shelled out $386 million for Enterasys Networks Inc., an Andover, Mass.-based Touter and switching company.

Gores Group and Tennenbaum Capital Partners paid a 32 percent premium over its stock price of about $10 per share. (The company executed an 8-1 stock split in October, when shares were trading in the $1 range.) The security hardware company, which reported a loss of $71.1 million on revenues of $357 million in 2004, will retain its Massachusetts headquarters.

Staff Reporter Hilary Potkewitz can be reached at [phone] or by e-mail at [e-mail].