Company Town : California No. 1 in Multimedia, Study Finds : Technology: UCLA report says the Bay Area has a slight edge over Los Angeles in the number of such businesses. State thrives on its connections to Silicon Valley and the studios.
The Bay Area has the most multimedia businesses in California, but the Los Angeles area is a close second and is catching up fast, according to a study released Thursday by a UCLA researcher.
Allen J. Scott, associate dean of UCLA’s School of Public Policy and Social Research, said California’s multimedia industry is the largest in the world and that it thrives on its connections to Silicon Valley technologies and Hollywood entertainment studios.
Although the Bay Area--particularly San Francisco’s South of Market district--has the largest number of multimedia firms at 198, Southern California is close behind at 188. There are 45 in the rest of California.
“The propaganda that the Bay Area is winning the multimedia race is not true,” Scott said. “Southern California is catching up and moving ahead.”
Scott presented his findings Thursday at a conference sponsored by the university’s Business Forecasting Project. The results were largely based on surveys he sent out to multimedia companies last summer.
Scott said he sees multimedia, which melds two classic California industries, splitting along similar lines. Bay Area firms increasingly focus on business and technological applications, he said, while Southern California is turning to entertainment.
Even without the high-tech studio envisioned by DreamWorks SKG for Playa Vista, Southern California’s young multimedia industry has been growing steadily, Scott said.
The Playa Vista studio, the brainchild of DreamWorks founders Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, should make the industry grow even faster, according to Scott.
“That’s a very important anchoring point for the whole industry in Southern California,” he said. Because DreamWorks is likely to subcontract much of its multimedia work, smaller companies will benefit as well, he said.
According to the study, more than a fifth of those who started up Southern California multimedia firms started in the motion pictures or television.
By contrast, the most common previous career for Bay Area multimedia entrepreneurs was sales or marketing, Scott found.
California multimedia companies are by and large small--more than half have fewer than 10 employees--and young--more than half started after 1990.
In the Los Angeles area, multimedia companies are clumped in and around Santa Monica, but that will likely probably after DreamWorks breaks ground next year.
DreamWorks “would shift the center of gravity of the whole multimedia, entertainment industry,” Scott said. “It’ll move further west and further south.”
