Montreal: Astral Communications has kicked off a $25 million three-pronged expansion of its technical service facilities with the official opening of an $8 million videocassette duplication plant in Montreal and the inauguration of a compact disc and cassette duplication plant in Boca Raton, Fla.

AstralTech, Astral’s technical services division, has also announced the startup of construction on a new motion picture laboratory and dubbing studio, to be located across from Maison Astral in downtown Montreal.

Astral management opened the new duplication plant – located in the mid-city suburb of the Town of Mount Royal – March 21, then traveled to Baco Raton March 24 to cut the ribbon on the AstralTech Americas Duplication Centre.

The 200,000-square-foot AstralTech Video Duplication Centre has an annual capacity of 12 million videocassettes, or up to 50,000 feature-length cassettes per day at peak season .

‘The operation is the biggest of its kind in Canada, the seventh largest in North America, and probably ranks among the biggest in the world,’ says Harold Greenberg, Astral chairman and ceo.

The new plant employs 250 people, 300 in peak season.

To equip the new facility, AstralTech purchased 1,000 Panasonic vcrs for a total of 4,160 on-line units made up of the two-year-old Panasonic 6840 model and the new state-of-the-art 6850 playback model, says Armand Cournoyer, vice-president and general manager of the AstralTech Video Duplication Centre.

‘The expansion makes us more productive, more competitive,’ says Cournoyer. ‘It takes one flick of the switch to get the whole 4,000 units going.’

Cournoyer says the facility can duplicate up to 12 titles simultaneously, in high-quality real time, sourced from 1′ and D2 masters.

The Canadian videocassette duplication market has exploded in the past seven years, says Cournoyer.

Currently, between 25 million to 30 million videocassettes are duplicated each year in Canada with the market largely dominated by five or six bigger operators including Astral and RSB Video in Montreal and Cinram, Agincourt and vtr in Toronto. They are chased by a myriad of smaller shops with 200 to 300 vcr capacity.

Duplication costs to producers and distributors vary according to quality and length, from $3 up to $7 for a 150- to 160-minute film, with additional charges applied for trimming, packaging, promotions, a fast-growth area, stickers, etc.

Astral’s biggest clients in the French- and English-language duplication field are Buena Vista Home Video (Disney) and Columbia TriStar Home Video. The company also has a multi-year deal with the National Film Board.

Astral has also announced the three-year renewal of a duplication agreement with Buena Vista Home Video.

The Boca Raton cd and cassette duplication plant has an annual capacity of 15 million units, and Greenberg says the Montreal plant may also be outfitted for the production of compact discs.

According to Cournoyer, the largest videocassette duplications runs in Canada – between 1.5 million and two million units – are for titles that work well in both the sell-through and rental markets, typically children’s films like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast.