The Hobbit: Video Technology You Can Do at Home

Consumer technology has gotten so good that the professionals the author once paid to produce something startling now have difficulty staying ahead. He calls this phenomenon the Quality Curve, where the rising quality of what you can produce with the iPhone or Samsung in your hand, if drawn as an upward line, now often surpasses the quality of professional producers. If the excellence of what you or the author creates rivals that of pros, the demand for their wizardry starts to slip. The threat is real; while US movie ticket revenue is up in recent years, the actual number of tickets sold domestically has slumped 14%, from 1.58 billion to 1.35 billion, over the past decade. But the real reason they find attempts for big-screen splash boring is, well, they like playing in the content arena themselves. US sales of video games now outpace Hollywood's domestic ticket sales. Despite the hoopla over social media, US consumers remain addicted to video.