Silicon Valley Stirs Up Hollywood
J Thoendell stashed this in Film
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/fashio...
Mr. Lucas pointed his nose in the air and sniffed like a rabbit. “Do you smell that?” he said. (I wiggled my nose a little, but beyond the whiff of bad coffee, I got nothing.) “It’s the smell of money,” he said. “That’s why they’re here.”
The problem was, these Down There executives weren’t sure if the tech moguls wanted to join forces, buy them or destroy them. (Maybe it’s all of the above, just not in that particular order.) It was like watching tourists go cage-diving with sharks, the scent of blood and chum in the water, and as the sharp teeth and fins become visible, wondering if the bars are strong enough to keep the predators at bay.
Hollywood and Silicon Valley have always been at odds. Down There thinks that without its movies and TV shows, Up Here would have no content to show. Up Here thinks that Down There can be disrupted, just like every other industry. But with Hollywood having one of the worse summers in recent memory, and the economics of the movie industry undergoing technological upheaval, Silicon Valley may have the upper hand.
Stashed in: Silicon Valley!, Hollywood, economics, Snapchat
Love it.
Software production and digital content production have extremely similar attributes. They both take extreme technical skills, a computer science degree or two, and amazing powers of agility, product management, and enterprising diligence.
And the overlap to date has been CGI and computer-science engineers going into massively complex product and on-time delivery product management that Silicon Valley startups du jour could learn lessons from.
There's no greater innovation than an immutable deadline meets an immovable budget. Silicon Valley has been too comfy and plush with not being 'lean' enough despite all their talk.
Silicon valley does definitely NOT have the upper hand. Not for technology and digital content production. Maybe their business model is just a little off, but even consumer software companies could learn a thing or two from big data mining, audience analytics, and offline UX.
I'm not sure how they're defining Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
Snapchat (pictured) is an LA company.
George Lucas lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
These two worlds are much more connected than people think.
11:11 AM Oct 16 2014