Conference: Entrepreneurship in Entertainment Technology by Carl Rosendahl from Carnegie Mellon

The talk was given by  Carl Rosendahl, an Associate Professor teaching at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center. He is a currently a co-director of the Silicon Valley satellite campus.
His talk explained how films from the release of Disney's first animated film to the present blockbuster films we see in the cinema today has restore the film industry and where it might be leading to in the future. This talk was different from the others I had attended but I found it knowledgable because it taught me how you might be an entrepreneur in the current state the industry is in.

The Golden Age of Hollywood: Sound and colour was introduced to movies and Disney was the first company to produce the first animated colour film. During that time, an average American citizen went to at least 30 films a year, so the industry was booming back then.

Disruption

In 1963, films were made with 15 million dollars, now in 2013 the average film cost 230 million dollars.

What happened since then?

Franchises started being released, it increased the long term value of the films and it was to entice the American audience back into the cinemas, since the 1960s the revenue growth has been from international sources.

If you look at where digital technology was increasingly being used in films and then look at what the audience were spending their cinema tickets on, you can see that the top ten box office films heavily relied on digital technology. There is a relationship that these types of films using digital technology were more popular with the audience. Sci-fi, animated films were a more popular genre for this type of technique.

It currently takes a lot more people in a team to make an animated film than in the past. For Snow White, it took like 64 people while Frozen, released in 2013, took 222 people, even with high running render farms. Frozen has grossed 1.1 billion dollars, gaining a place in the top ten grossing films.

Now film companies are seeing a pattern and have started supporting franchises, franchise films have a larger audience that most likely would see sequels.

Because of advancing technology, stores like Blockbuster started losing business, a factor for this is because of the Internet.

When the Internet became available to the general public, it affected the physical media business, but boosted companies like Netflix and Amazon so instead of returning films back to Blockbuster stores, Netflix allowed the people to have monthly online subscriptions.

Current world dominators are Youtube, Flickr and Wordpress at the time Web 2.0 was created.

Open Source software also became popular and made some softwares widely available to people such as Word, Excel and Photoshop.

The Mobile Disruption

This started with the portable Walkman, then books using Kindle, then games and photography with I-phones allowed for better video usage.

Being mobile with media means most devices today have features like an audio recorder, Internet, Wifi, touchscreen and camera.

The most profitable companies that have benefited from this is Twitter, Instagram, Angry Birds and Vine. They have seen a space in the market business and utilised today's technology to make profit.

The good thing about Angry Birds is that it is there whenever you need to occupy yourself, it does not take much dedication, this has been a factor in its success.

Vine allows you only to upload 10 second videos, this switches the boat and keeps viewers engaged because it only engages you for a short period of time.

These profitable companies have been able to for see the long term actions that might take place with technology.

The benefits of mobile technology is convenience, attention scaling with size and it allows people to be more social.