Basic Heroes - Visual Basic Programmer's Journal Magazine
Film Distribution Made Easy
You probably focus on the on-screen action when watching a movie in a theater, but the action behind the scenes is what makes your film-going experience possible. From booking to billing, Hollywood Software Inc.'s TDS 2000 product makes movie distribution easier for theaters and distributors to handle.
Used by studios including Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, and Universal Studios, TDS 2000 automates the distribution of films to theaters. It improves on the 15- to 20-year-old mainframe systems that previously handled this complex task. One of the product's main goals was to improve workflow between groups and companies; it can now interface with third-party vendors such as AC Nielsen and Technicolor. Its GUI offers multiscreen views and data-entry capability, and the product can fully process bookings and accounts receivable. It also calculates box-office grosses and co-op advertising, and is scalable from one user to several hundred users.
Hollywood Software used Visual Basic 5.0, SQL Server 6.5, Tidestone's Formula One, and Seagate Software's Crystal Reports 7.0 to create TDS 2000. The product took a year to develop, and includes more than 50,000 lines of VB code and 711 stored procedures.
Because TDS 2000 handles millions of transactions, the team of 10 Hollywood Software developers focused primarily on database performance and contention when developing the product. To do this, they created a series of VB classes to streamline the application's front end. These classes include database access, grid, and user interface classes. Its thin-client architecture lets TDS 2000 run on connections ranging from wide area networks (WANs) to 28.8 modem dial-up connections.
Future plans for the product include marketing TDS 2000 internationally, putting the product in a suite of Hollywood Software integrated applications called Digital Studio System, and launching an application service provider (ASP) version of TDS 2000. These improvements should help theaters and distributors make the film booking process even more seamless.
—Susannah Pfalzer
For additional information, please contact Hollywood Software, Inc., 1604 N. Cahuenga Blvd. Suite 115, Hollywood, CA 90028. Phone: (323) 463-2144. FAX: (323) 463-1319. Email: info@hollywoodsoftware.com or david_gajda@hollywoodsoftware.com. Web sites: www.hollywoodsoftware.com, www.theatricaldistribution.com, and www.Rightsmart.com.
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