Exclusive | Enhancing the perfect surround sound, Dolby Atmos' Pankaj Kedia

From silent era movies to sci-fi’s and to action, India has witnessed movies in every genre. Watching a movie with perfect picture quality and surround sound is always the demand of the viewers in our country.  A name that has been zealously delivering and catering to the need of perfect surround sound is Dolby Atmos. In the cinema, at home, and on the go, Dolby Atmos is focused towards transporting you from an ordinary moment into an extraordinary experience with breathtaking, moving audio that flows all around you.

Known to make it apt for filmmakers to place or move specific sounds anywhere in the movie theatre, including overhead, Dolby Atmos makes the audience experience an out of the world feeling.
Introduced in April 2012, Dolby Atmos has been embraced by all the major Hollywood studios and today stand tall with more than 900 Dolby Atmos screens in more than 40 countries and with more than 250 exhibitor partners. Dolby Atmos has more than 200 films from 17 different countries scheduled to be released since the first film debuted in June 2012. 

With an aim to get a deeper insight Adgully caught up with Pankaj Kedia, Sr. Regional Director, India, South East Asia, ANZ, Dolby Laboratories.

Very recently, Dolby announced their association with Balaji Motion Pictures to release several Dolby Atmos titles in a broad range of genre starting with Azhar (Md. Azharuddin’s biopic). Elaborating on the same, Kedia said, “We have been working with Balaji on the television from quite some time now hence we thought of taking that partnership ahead with an aim to take cinematic storytelling to a new level.”

As like always last year too saw some of the great movies coming up. So when asked how the year gone by was for Dolby, he said, “The year was good for us. We grew in quite a few dimensions though but to make a strong presence in the market it will take certain amount of time as there is a large amount of investment that is done in this space. Overall we grew about 6 percent, globally and our broadcasting business too has seen encouraging numbers. ”

Since technology is one thing that has always been accepted with its own sweet time and patience by the Indian audiences, Kedia feels that it will take some more time for the players to understand the need and demands of the perfect sound effects. “The space that we are in needs a lot of innovation at every point of time. But we did see some changes from the inception of Dolby in terms of acceptance and once people start understanding the power of the medium we shall see some more positive results.”

Dolby not only witnessed encouraging results in terms of acceptance but also expanded its footprints in quite a few markets and expects to get 100 odd more screens by the middle of this year. Kedia said, “The response so far has been really good both from our exhibitors and consumers. We would want to expand our footprints as and when possible but with right strategy in place. As of now we have around 900 screens across the world and we will be looking at expansion with innovation like recently we launched our Dolby Cinema which is a fully branded one with the best of our technology.”

After garnering successful numbers in the year gone by, Dolby Atmos would like to continue to strengthen the vision and mission of the company whether through getting more screens under Atmos’ bouquet or launching more cinemas. He said, “This year seems to have quite a lot of opportunity for us with ICC World Cup coming up and we shall be looking forward to utilizing that opportunity. And not only would that but we will be open for capturing new opportunities in the broadcasting space too. ”  

Cinema and broadcasting being the focus areas, Dolby will also be looking at strengthening its footprints in the digital space. “Though Digital space is still at its nascent stage in India but is surely a potential market for us. As in India Television and Cinema are our key focus areas but we also see a huge opportunity in digital space. ”

Though Kedia was not so pro about talking on the detailed growth results but mentioned that emerging markets have registered good growth for the company. For the records, Dolby Atmos has received technical achievement awards from both the Hollywood Post Alliance and the Cinema Audio Society. As the inventors of the only object-based audio format used in the cinema today, Dolby is working closely with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in driving adoption of standards for object-based audio.