Filmed yes. But then where does the film go for editing, color correction, adr, and other post? Hollywood. And then the executives screen it and then it’s dostributed and all of that is in LA too.
The expensive parts have moved elsewhere (principal photography and special effects) because it’s easy to transmit data, but all the stuff that comes before and after still happens in Hollywood for the most part.
> The expensive parts have moved elsewhere (principal photography and special effects) because it’s easy to transmit data, but all the stuff that comes before and after still happens in Hollywood for the most part.
So you'll concede that a strong cost play exists to move away, and are basically betting that inertia maintains the status quo?
Absolutely. I myself run my company as fully remote for this very reason. But I think I'm pretty leading edge in that respect -- most companies still believe having an office is important.
There are post production facilities all over the world, for instance Wellington has a cluster of world class facilities in the suburb of Miramar like Park Road Post and Weta Digital
With 2Gbps fibre connections there is no reason to think that places are required to be geographically in the same area.
Georgia will soon pass a post-production tax incentive designed to draw the other parts of the industry to Atlanta and capitalize on the production momentum.
I would disagree - as someone from Cambridge/Boston that frequents SF I would say Silicon Valley isn't all it's hyped to be. The majority of startups I come across out there are simply looking to get rich quick and are in it for the game rather than actually innovating anything.
When it comes to actual innovation I have yet to find anything comes close to the level Cambridge/Boston is on, especially in life sciences & AI. If only it weren't for the frigid winters...
Also a Boston native that's moved to Silicon Valley.
The rule of thumb I've seen is that technologies are invented in Boston and commercialized out West (either in SV or Seattle). Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit, YCombinator, and DropBox are all Boston startups...but you wouldn't know it unless you're intimately familiar with their histories.
This has a lot to do with the business cultures of the respective places. When I was working in Boston, the message I got was "Work hard for 30 years, build up expertise, and then maybe you can get a VC to fund your startup - but only if it's in an industry where you know who your customers are and how to make money!" And then Google came calling and was like "Wanna help us redesign the search results page?", and I saw many of my colleagues leave and successfully found startups, and folks here are like "Got an idea? Just go quit and start working on it, and if it turns out to be worth anything funding will be available."
I'd say that Boston understands technology better than Silicon Valley, but aren't very savvy about how to apply it for maximum impact. In Boston, people really really want to be smart, and thorough, and innovative, and fully explore all the implications of what they're doing before they bring it to market. In Silicon Valley, people are like "You know a tiny bit more about something than somebody somewhere else? Great, bring it to market, listen to feedback, and then go hire some smart MIT grads to work out the details."
The market seems to reward the latter approach much better. Silicon Valley's internalized the counterintuitive market maxim of "It's better to be differentiated than good", while Boston is still hung up on being good.
That's a goos point. However, not sure how one would compare Boston to SV then.
It seems like Boston has a few good unis, which SV also has. So, the number of good ideas that come out of it are maybe equal, but all of the rest (which is 95%) that comes after, is 100x better in SV, no?
As someone who would love to move back to Boston that's a very hard sell. Especially when the biggest success story is Hubspot (of "Disrupted" fame) which is more Silicon Valley than Silicon Valley is.
A lot of perception is flavored by the fact that a lot of the time "tech" gets defined as what dominates Silicon Valley. So you get taxi companies counted as tech and bio/pharma or fintech often not.
That said, while California does have a lot more VC funding, New York and Massachusetts and #2 and #3 even though Boston/Cambridge in particular tend to not be mentioned in these kind of discussions.
Toronto has been Hollywood North for a long time now. It's interesting to see how defensive people from SV are on this topic. No empire lasts forever and SV won't either. It's naive to genuinely believe that there are no smart people outside of SV, or that everyone wants to move to SV.
