If you've been to a movie recently, some of these logos might look familiar.
The name Dolby has become synonymous with entertainment. For years, it's
outfitted theaters with its audio technology. It played a major role in
developing stereo and surround sound and making the technology ubiquitous in
theaters and consumers homes. Dolby played a big part made a big part in defining what movie
going audio was. Although we largely associate Dolby today with movies, the
company actually got its start in audio noise-reduction. Dolby was started by Ray
Dolby in the 1960s with the idea that he could fundamentally improve the
performance of tape recording. The challenge with tape was that it was
noisy and Ray figured out how to make it less noisy which improved performance
but also enabled people to get more tracks on a single piece of tape. If you
know the song Bohemian Rhapsody that was an example of a song that was really
made possible by the fact that you could get multiple tracks on the same piece of
tape and build up a new way of using sound and building a sonic soundscape.
Dolby's noise reduction technology became a commercial success and quickly
became the standard on audio cassettes and solidified Dolby's place in the industry.
Today, Dolby is everywhere . If you go to a
theater, its sound encoding technology enables the surround sound. When you pick
up a DVD or blu-ray you'll find the Dolby logo on the back that's because of
its Dolby Digital audio compression technology, which was also used in all HD
broadcasts in the U.S. Since it was founded 50 years ago, the company has
grown to a market cap of $7 billion and brings in over a billion in
revenue annually. With over 8,000 patents on its technology, 90%
of Dolby's revenue comes from licensing that technology to content creators and
OMS. Dolby's latest focus is on two products Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision. We had the idea that rather than just adding more channels, we could take
a big step forward by now representing audio in three-dimensional space.
Dolby Atmos is a paradigm shift in how sound works.
Traditionally multi-channel sound has functioned as groups. Dolby Stereo, which
was Dobly's first cinema sound technology, worked with four channels. A left and a
right channel as well as a center and surround channel for speakers in the
rear of the theater. The 5.1 setup of Dolby Digital features six channels:
center channel dedicated the dialogue, left and right channels to music and
sound effects, one channel to the subwoofer and left and right rear
channels tosound effects. With Dolby Surround 7.1, it expanded upon this again
by adding another set of left and right channels. Most every film released today
is mixed in Dolby Surround 7.1. Atmos instead works in a spatial capacity.
Allowing up to 128 audio tracks to be distributed around all the speakers in
an auditorium. This creates a more immersive sound experience for the
audience .We realized with that evolution when talking to theater owners and the
people creating content for the movie theaters was adding more channels
wasn't going to be enough of a step forward in terms of the experience. So
that's ultimately where the germ of the notion of Dolby Atmos came from. On the
visual end of the spectrum is Dolby Vision. Dolby's partnership with AMC
Theaters started in 2015 when they started opening dedicated Dolby
screening rooms with dual 4k Christie Laser Projection systems for Dolby
Vision. The technology is Dolby's version of HDR
High Dynamic Range. The key evolution with Dolby vision relative to
traditional imaging technologies is better pixels. Darker darks and brighter
brights and colors that you've really never seen before on a screen. HDR is
another tool for the filmmakers to further immerse the audience in their
stories and this is as big a change as SD was to HD. Moviegoers can experience
this all packaged as Dolby Cinema. It's cinema concept that competes with the
likes of IMAX and other premium exhibition options. In partnership with
AMC, the world's largest theater chain, it expanded the number of Dolby Cinema
locations to a 100 earlier this year. And just recently signed a partnership
deal to increase the number of Dolby Cinemas in China.
But Dolby is also aggressively expanding its technologies into our homes. We're
partnering with Netflix, with Amazon, with HEE
in China, all of the major content delivery formats. Content creators are
increasingly utilizing the format's as a way to make watching TV shows and movies
more immersive. One of the biggest adopters of the
format's is Netflix, which now has over 500 hours of Dolby vision content and
over a hundred for Atmos and that continues to grow every day. Was a great
marriage with Dolby when they came out with Dolby vision and Atmos we really
saw those as opportunities to to level up the quality of the picture and the
sound and also to provide great opportunities to our film makers and
showrunners to tell stories in new ways we've always wanted to show movies and
TV shows as they were intended in the highest quality possible.
Dolby is betting big on Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision becoming the new standard for
audio and visuals, but as consumers we may take for granted how much goes on
behind the scenes to make our products look and sound great.
Dolby is one of the few companies in the world has the patience to bring an
experience like Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos to the world. Very often it takes a
decade or more to actually fully realize the vision of something like Dolby
Vision in Dolby Atmos we had to reimagine the tools that audio editors
and sound designers would need. Distribution partners and playback
partners; we had to work with them to evolve their distribution channels and
our playback products to conceive of now audio in three-dimensional space. The
distinct advantage of Atmos of a previous multi-channel audio is that
content only needs to be mixed once and can then play properly on many different
devices, regardless of speaker configuration. One of the reasons that
content creators and content distributors love Dolby Atmos on
television is that they scale. They scale all the way from the movie-going
experience down to a mobile phone. The fact that the technology scales benefits
consumers as they increasingly watch content on the go this is where Dolby is
focusing its efforts next. Bringing the same technology they use in theaters to
all of our portable devices we're not ready to accept that portability always
comes at the cost of a poor audio or imaging experience. To integrate this
technology into devices, Dolby over a hundred labs to test and
configure the optimal audio and visual experience. We have very sophisticated
labs where we're able to in real-time model out how an end consumer will
actually experience Dolby Atmos and Dolby vision and in an iterative way
evolve the designs. Not all that different from what launched the company
back in the 60s, with Ray Dolby and his quest to fix recording noise. The
engineers and teams that Dolby are constantly looking at ways they can enhance the content we'd love to watch.
We've got 900,000 people which is just intrinsically working on getting the last decibel lot
of sound performance making sure that the video just looks a little bit
brighter so even though we are small we can really focus our talent and our
intellectual horsepower on specific elements and make an absolute difference
to consumers, video, and audio.
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