The Biz

The world is teetering on the brink of the Great Depression, The Sequel. Now for another piece of amazing news: The financial mugging being perpetrated on much of the manufacturing sector in the U.S. seems to have thus far avoided crippling many entertainment-related businesses. There may be an empty seat or two for a Cher or Bette show at Caesars, but you can bet money that all the lights will be working.

Right about now, you’re starting to see the first twinkling of holiday lighting. Even among industry professionals, the red and green waves that presage Christmas quickly blend into the background. That is, until you turn the corner on a neighborhood like Howard Beach, in Queens, N.Y., where traffic slows to a crawl for over a month as people converge from the tri-state area to gawk at lighting displays that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

The Beijing Summer 2008 Olympics may have been destined to be controversial, and it didn’t take long for the Games to spark public debate. One of the earliest flashpoints centered on what took place — and didn’t — during the opening seconds of the opening ceremony. Leading up to the dramatic, drummed countdown at 8:08 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2008, viewers at home and on giant screens inside the National Stadium, aka the Bird’s Nest, watched as 29 giant footprints outlined in fireworks proceeded gloriously above the city from Tiananmen Square to the 29th Olympiad.

The next time you see projection video in an entertainment venue, think of it as also mentoring a student in elementary or high school. That’s because the projection has been discovering potentially vast new fields to till in the education sector. The penetration of digital, widescreen, HD and other advanced projection technology into education environments are difficult to measure precisely but anecdotal evidence suggests it has become a huge trend. The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) estimated that at its annual convention in San Antonio the 40 projection systems manufacturers that exhibited there last July had doubled in a little over five years. 

Days before InfoComm opened mid-June in Las Vegas, one of the world’s leading projection video purveyors announced the acquisition of one of the lighting industry’s most well known brands. Barco’s purchase of High End Systems further solidifies the ongoing convergence between video and lighting and in the process seeks to redefine what had been individual sectors under the rubric of the events market. High End Systems, Inc. was majority-owned by Generation Partners, a U.S. private equity firm, which acquired the company in 1998.

As I write, the cost of a gallon of diesel fuel had just topped $4.25 and crude oil is $130 per barrel, reflecting double-digit price spikes during some weeks in June and April. The rising cost of fuel has prompted the American Trucking Associations (ATA) to project a record high diesel fuel bill in 2008, with expenditures of $135 billion on fuel in 2008, up from the $112.6 billion spent by the industry in 2007. God knows what the price of fuel will be in July when you’re reading this, but at the current rate of increase, petroleum-based fuels are rising at about 92 times the national inflation rate.

On the cusp of the concert-touring season, projection video finds itself coming to terms with the LED. A quick survey of some projection video systems providers finds that the sector is still robust, but that LEDs are gaining ground with designers and bookkeepers, thanks to their lower cost, increasing flexibility and programmability and how easily they pack and transport.

With the NSCA show rolling into its show this year, InfoComm becomes that much more relevant to a wider swath of professionals in lighting, staging, projection and rentals. Thus, InfoComm’s recently released annual survey of its increasingly inclusive constituency offers some insights into where these sectors might be headed.

Live performances have become the currency of the entertainment industry. It’s most obvious in music, where an ever-growing percentage of recording artists derive more revenues from their concert tours than from CD sales. But the rise in the number of live events is evident in many other sectors, from spectacular corporate presentations to events like the celebration at the start of the New York City Opera’s season last year, which saw Times Square filled with thousands of folding chairs facing huge video monitors beneath light and sound rigs. With gala events taking place in unique outdoor settings, it isn’t just Elvis who’s left the theatre.

The first Strike Survival Workshop that IATSE’s hard-hit Local 728 in Hollywood ran late last year was standing-room-only, which suggests the impact that the strike by the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) was having on those who literally do set the stage for filmed and televised entertainment. The second one, held Feb. 8, a clinic for financial help and counseling from the Motion Picture Trust Fund, was just as packed.

Last year seemed to be a tipping point for Thomas Edison’s most ubiquitous invention. Early in 2007, California Assemblyman Lloyd E. Levine proposed legislation that would ban incandescent lamps. The move was dismissed as a political stunt, but it did initiate some global hand-wringing and soul-searching, and that led to political initiatives in Canada and the 27 member states of the European Council to announce that those countries would begin researching similar out-with-incandescent lamp strategies. In mid-year, Australia became the first country to proclaim a policy designed to eliminate the most energy-inefficient forms of incandescent lighting. This will take the form of a standard — yet to be determined — for light source efficiency that must be met by every lighting product sold. Whatever that standard eventually is, it will certainly be far greater than the approximately 5 percent efficiency of the everyday incandescent bulb, which loses 95 percent of its energy in the form of heat.