Half of all films released in Dolby Atmos are from India, says John Couling

The first Dolby Cinema in India opened on Thursday at City Pride in Pune. It is among the six — one each in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Kochi, Trichy and Ulikkal — to open this year in the country. Dolby Cinema is a combination of Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos (3D sound). The San Francisco-based Dolby, which made revenues of $1.3 billion in 2024, offers audio and visual technologies that filmmakers from Christopher Nolan to SS Rajamouli swear by. In a video interview from San Francisco, John Couling, senior vice-president (Entertainment), Dolby Laboratories, spoke to Vanita Kohli-Khandekar. Edited excerpts: 

Where does Dolby sit in the entertainment ecosystem globally? 

Entertainment might be a movie, your favourite sports team, a game or music. You might enjoy it in the cinema hall, on your phone, or in your car. Dolby has a presence in every one of those experiences in all those different places. We do that through partnerships with the creator, the filmmaker, the musician, and with the service that delivers that. It might be Gaana Music, or Star Sports, or JioHotstar, or a movie-maker. Or it might be the devices. Your phone, your car, like a Mahindra car, for example, has Dolby inside. 

Does your revenue come from licence fees for the tech? 

Yes. All our partners are partners who invest with us, whether they’re making something, a device, or a show, or whatever it might be. The actual monetisation part of Dolby’s business is from the device-maker. This could be your phone, television, or car. On the creation side, there’s a lot of partnership through investment. 

How dependent is Dolby on the entertainment business? 

The entertainment group spans experiences all the way from the movie theatre to your phone and your car. It is one of the largest areas of Dolby. 

What are the differences that crop up while working with different screens — cinema, CTV, or mobile? 

That is a really good question, because there’s sort of a technology piece and then there’s a creative piece. When you’re creating something, and trying to make it work across a really wide range of playback, it might be a small screen that someone is watching in a bus or a train, or it might be a movie screen in a cinema hall. 

Getting something to what we call “translate between all of those different experiences” is actually quite challenging. So, a lot of the technology thought that we put into our systems is to aid that translation. It’s either to make the technology do the work, so that it goes from a very big space to a very small space, or a very big screen to a very small screen. But also we give controls to the creator, so that they can influence how that translation happens. When they are making the content, they think about what else is going to play on? How else is it going to be seen? How do I want that to be represented? We give them those capabilities to influence that translation.  

Dolby Cinema launched in 2014. It is already at about 300 screens globally. Why the delay in bringing it to India? 

The movies we love, and the role cinema plays in our life is a little bit different in different places. We wanted to get the product just right for the Indian exhibition market. 

Where is Dolby placed in India, and how do you view the market? 

About half of all films released in Dolby Atmos are from India (Dolby Atmos, the company’s sound technology, is used by 1,000 theatres in the country). India is a market that we’ve been in for as long as I’ve been at Dolby – which is 27 years. 

In fact, our founder (Ray Dolby) came up with his original ideas that started the company on his journey back from India to the UK. (The story goes that as a science advisor to the Unesco, Ray Dolby visited India. He was flummoxed by the problem of recording Indian classical and folk music. That was how he thought of a noise reduction technology). India holds a special place for us and is home to a phenomenal amount of filmmaking. But our partnerships go far beyond exhibition.  

The IPL, which has a global reach, is something that we work on with Star Sports. We are working with local manufacturers like Boat and Zebronics to bring consumer electronics experiences to people’s homes. Our partnerships do go beyond creators to manufacturers like Mahindra. 

 

Because there is this fast-growing capability inside India to build soundbars, or cars, or televisions, all of which, I think, can benefit from partnership with Dolby. It is a market that has a lot of excitement for us.