Bob Iger, the man who animated Disney
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
Disney doesn’t tend to get enough credit as a tech company because to them tech takes a back seat to entertainment in the public eye. That can be frustrating and humbling as an engineer, at times, but its definitely enlightening.
Weren't Bob Iger and Steve Jobs close or at least friends?
That kind of echoes Jobs' sentiment about "technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
Tech to these guys is a means to a goal.
They are doing both (creating and buying). They bought Pixar, but are also making movies internally that are comparable in quality like Frozen, Big Hero 6, Moana, and Wreck it Ralph.
Frozen was done after the Pixar acquisition and helmed internally by the same director from Pixar that Disney had sought to have do it when they wanted to do it with Pixar before the acquisition, so, while it wasn't organizationally within Pixar but at Disney Animation Studios, I'm not sure you can really describe it as not independent of the Pixar acquisition.
Not to mention, Disney is excellent at marketing. Top of their class, I'd say.
I don't know. Most people who have an inkling about engineering generally regard the theme parks with nothing short of awe.
I think more in the early days of film they were more highly regarded for this. Especially among animators. Disney pioneered a lot animation and filmmaking techniques. Though their acquiring and Hmmm 'lifting of source material and content' has always happened. Take a look at Disney's Aladdin vs the Popeye version, the story elements changed from the original story are eerily similar between the two.
> Disney will have to lose money it could otherwise make in order to differentiate its streaming service.
> Such a move cuts against much industrial organizational economic theory. Theorists posit that corporations like Disney tend not to intentionally lose money just to acquire market power, because foregoing revenue is not, apparently, rational. This theory is nonsense. After all, if Disney is willing to tolerate losses just to drive competitors out of business, then vertical foreclosure is deeply problematic, and perhaps illegal.
The reason it's not typically rational is that you have no guarantee of being able to maintain your monopoly once you've cornered the market. As soon as you raise prices to recoup your losses, competitors will come out of the woodwork. This is not the case with media companies though, because they have a government enforced 95 year monopoly on their content.
If Disney were to put Netflix out of business, buy Netflix's content, and then raise their Disney+ service price, I cannot legally setup a competing service to stream Netflix's old content.
TL;DR: The economic theory that says predatory pricing is usually irrational assumes fungible goods, but media is not fungible.
It could be. Imagine a world where movies don't cost millions of dollars to make.
https://www.webfilmschool.com/independent-filmmaking-the-7-m...
It's a tooling problem more than a budget one.
In fifty years I think we'll be telling the machines what stories we want to experience. But between now and that dreamy future, there are intermediate points along the path that empower individual or small groups of creatives to lift mountains - I think of it much in the same way as languages and tools and libraries make it so we don't have to string together vacuum tubes to solve our problems. Think about the kinds of problems filmmakers face: writing a cohesive narrative, finding and lighting a scene, editing massive amounts of video. It's all just a problem of tooling.
When there is a way that lets you or anyone with an ounce of creativity turn their dreams into polished, watchable content, it will democratize storytelling.
If you have ever seen the prequels, neither can George Lucas....
https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/media/the-secret-we...
It's always "I used to work at and so and so is great" or "I know someone who worked at and so and so is great".