those big productions are production design and above the line heavy. Most people on shoots are paid well. However, if you look at the other side of the coin, hardware and software supporting the industry, it's actually "laughable". ARRI which is the biggest name in the game on shoots is ~$1b, RED was sold of for $85m, BMD could fetch as high as $3b, Autodesk's Media & Entertainment is <%5 of its revenue which would, if it were standalone, also bring it to around $1b valuation. Avid the same at ~$1.5, Grass Valley the same ~$1b-1.5, Sony's ET&S is hard to gauge since it includes everything, but an estimate is ~$1.5b, Maxon ~$1.5, all of Nikon $4b, Canon's camera division ~$15b...
and then you have Adobe which has ~%65 of its revenue coming from Creative segment ($14-15b over $23.77 for 2025), which would put it at ~$70b - $100b valuation if it were standalone (5x-7x revenue).
That's how big Adobe is compared to literally everything else. Its creative division is 3x-4x more than the entire industry combined.
You do have new contenders now with Epic (~$22b), Canva ($26b), Figma ($20b), but I'm not convinced.. in certain segments for sure, but still not confident based on stock performance or revenue.
Adobe may be a big dog but it hasn’t insulated them from black magic eating more and more of their NLE market share with every passing year. BMD went from making a (niche for everyone else) Hollywood color tool to a full blown NLE with almost 20% of the market share in less than a decade. Not to mention a very respectable camera line.
I remember hearing the phrase “round tripping through resolve” for years as some sort of magical incantation only somebody in post production understood. Now resolve is fighting for Lightroom’s space within a full NLE. That’s something!
Yeah, BMD has a fighting chance. It's interesting how they got there (software-wise). They bought cutting-edge and expensive tools and kind of gave them away for free-ish. Hardware sales gave them a chest to do it with, and small market for those niche tools allowed them to buy it for peanuts. It's Autodesk's playbook on M&A but definitely different strategy in capturing the market.
Even Apple had a horse in the race with Color, but once Resolve became free or ridiculously cheap it was game over.. even for more advanced tools like Lustre (which merged into Flame), Film Light, Base Light, Scratch, etc. More than I can count which died even before that.
Turns out if you can afford to give your tool to wide audience with no budget, that's what they'll use (especially if it's any good) and will end up turning to you eventually for more professional setups once / if they get into pro waters.
It does kind of make sense for alphabet and meta considering their primary revenue driver is advertising and communication platforms respectively. That would put them into Media & Communications. IT is how they get to that. For amazon it's a bit more complicated, but still it's their retail that drives their revenue where AWS accounts for like ~20% of revenue.. however in amazon's case it's also AWS that also drives more than half of its profit.
smoother ride, no need for wheels so no road friction and fewer parts that wear, no need for shock absorbers as well, no need for roads clean of snow and ice which would make them both more practical and safer.. if we're talking star trek hovering, not rotor blade / hovercraft noisy shit with rotating parts that waste a ton of energy.
You asked what advantage would it have over rolling rubber, not how would one do it (you wouldn't with current understanding of physics and energy density/portability). Any at advantage vehicle like that is still in the realm of scifi.
Yes but it collides with our understanding of physics as well. Floating anything with significant weight within an air atmosphere requires constant power, you will at least have to profuce an upwards force that is equivalent to the downwards force. Depending on how efficiently that force is transfered you may need much more. A wheel made of rubber or steel (trains are freakingly efficient!) does give you that much cheaper.
Now theoretically one could envision some energy form that is so abundant it doesn't matter anymore that you constantly fight gravity, sure. But what most people seem to imagine is some magical tech that decouples the vehicle from the force of gravity, while still coupling it to the planet (or whatever the next relevant relevant frame of reference is) somehow. This kind of magical tech makes sense in films or scifi books, but if we just collect together what it would need to be, it is hard to envision any actual potential mechanism short of "we live in a Matrix and we lesrn to control the program".
That's a good question. When (if) we figure out how to practically travel at FTL speeds with a "warp drive", we might figure out the answer to this question too.
To be honest I think FTL is likelier than magical "sticks you to a fixed point in space relative to a rotating planet"-technology.
Sure you can do that with pushing air and a global positioning system, so if eventually we invent an eventual anti-gravity drive or something that may be used for the same thing. But wether such an entirely fictional device could be then made to (1) fit into a car sized vehicle and (2) be powered by whatever the most powerful mobile energy source is at that time and (3) become affordable to anyone outside of the 0.01% is another question.
>To be honest I think FTL is likelier than magical "sticks you to a fixed point in space relative to a rotating planet"-technology.
I disagree. I'm no physicist, but given how gravity seems to be related to the structure of spacetime according to Einsteinian physics, and a lot of FTL ideas seem to center on the idea of "warping" spacetime, I suspect the two are highly related, and if FTL is possible at all, it'll be also related to artificial gravity.
at that level (Tier 2) we're basically talking plasmonics, right? optics + antenna theory for the uninitiated. SPR, quantum plasmonics, active nanophotonics.. that's some advance shit from the (hopefully near) future, man. This is mostly in semiconductor research now, right? maybe biology?
I know something about game engines, I know a lot more about real time graphics, and I do even more about databases and implementation of those.
While it's nice to get yourself acquainted with all, especially easy to do with AI these days.. I do have to point out few things visible outside of myopia induced when looking from one perspective into another. In this case from gamedev to data world. In Cliff's notes since I don't have much time but I also don't want to give a drive-by snark since there are hidden values to this, imo, contrary to what I'm going to say.
What gamedev perspective myopia kind of ignores is, in no particular order..
persistence vs throughput - goal of data management is not only about execution speed. ACID, WAL, etc all are core features, not an overhead per se. Sometimes you can forego these, of course. Sometimes, if you understand what you're giving way to.
columnar fallacy, for the lack of better words - DoD, SoA are not secrets game engines use which others have forgotten. This in-particular ignores existence of OLAP. Clickhouse, Snowflake, HN's darling duckDB have been using SoA for _quite awhile_. AoS in OLTP is used because updating a single record _is_ faster that way. Why one over the other - see OLAP vs OLTP
Game engines obsess over cache hierarchy (L1-L3), and in particular cache misses by avoiding those with cache line packing, prefetching. Databases operate in a different real, that of I/O boundaries; Disk and network primarily. Bottleneck of databases is often the speed of light (latency) or the bus (NVME for example). packing structs is going to give you marginal benefit if you're waiting for 10ms for a network packet or a disk read. Suggested are micro optimizations in the context of a global system. Different realms of execution flows.
ECS are cool, everyone agrees on that. Relational databases are built on top of relational algebra though. So if you're up for running the same logic over many objects, ECS is going to be cool. If you want to allow for complex, arbitrary queries and set based logic you will need some guarantees of consistency. Complex, many-to-many joins across disparate ECS ssystems without predefined _system_ and you're foregoing the promised performance. What DBs are doing is general purpose, ECS ain't that.
Finally, yes game engines manage thousands, millions, of entities in localized 3D space. Databases manage billions, trillions, of records across petabytes of distributed storage. So, what gives? Entity model does not scale to distributed systems because of CAP theorem. No such thing as instant consistency in a globally distributed system without violating physics or sacrificing availability. TBH, some middle ground, localized to a machine, might give way to the idea but at what cost?
Don't let it shoot you down though. If there is still a kernel of idea tingling after that chat with AI, go ahead and drive through that CAP wall!
Such a shame both companies are big on vanity to make great things happen. Imagine where you could run Mac hardware with nvidia on linux. It's all there, and closed walls are what's not allowing it to happen. That's what we as customers lose when we forego control of what we purchase to those that sold us the goods.
Unfortunately, Apple still won't release iMessage for Android or Linux (unlike every other messenger platform, like whatsapp, telegram, wechat, microsoft teams, etc, which are all cross-platform).
Because of that, you need an apple device around to be able to deal with iMessage users.
Then it would be more correct to say that we "lose when we forego control" when our friends push the iMessage on us.
In my bubble literally noone uses iMessage. More tech savvy use Signal/GroupMe, less tech savvy use SMS/Email. Family use Signal to chat with me, as I can steer my own family a little.
Also I sometimes open web-interface of Facebook, but any attempts to offer WhatsApp I answer "sorry no Facebook apps on my phone, no Instagram/Messenger either". Never had any issues with that. Although I heard some countries are very dependent on Facebook, so might be hard there.
By the way, I noticed it's not hard to use multiple messengers actually, sometimes it's even faster to find a contact as you always remember what app to look at in recents.
UPDATE: My point is that you can also influence your life and how people communicate with you. Up to a point of course, but it's not like you can do nothing with it.
My social circle is the complete opposite. We're all on iMessage (except for one group of extended family on Messenger), and we like it that way. I was the last holdout for years while I went from Android -> Windows Phone -> Android -> iPhone.
But you don't need an Apple device to contact iMessage users. Every iMessage ID is a phone number (SMS/RCS) or email.
You've listed a whole bunch of alternatives available to you, but for some reason you demand that Apple change its unique offering into just another one of those for you. Why? Is that not a completely enforced monoculture?
Apple has always been off to the side, doing their own thing, and for some reason that fact utterly enrages people. They demand that Apple become just like everyone else. But we already have everyone else! And in every single field Apple is in, there is more of everyone else than there is of Apple.
Have you considered people like Apple products precisely because they're not like everything else? That making Apple indistinguishable from Facebook or Google is no victory, but a significant loss for customer choice?
I have been an Android user for the past 15 years, and somehow iMessage has never been a problem. Most of the time I don't even know if someone uses iMessage or not.
Good thing that iMessage is only popular in the US. I have never seen anybody using it, I don't even know how it looks, and if someone told me to use it I would laugh at them.
That is no longer true. https://bluebubbles.app/
Well… it’s not exactly no longer true, you do need an Apple VM but it doesn’t have to be the end device.
I don't understand the logic for downvotes.
We vote with our wallets.
When I could not update the Ram on my personal Dell machine I asked for a Frame.work in my new job. As my Intel based FW at work had thermal throttling problems, for my next personal purchase I got an AMD one. As Ubuntu had shady practices, I installed Fedora, as Gnome forced UX choices I did not want, I used KDE. As I wanted my machine to be even more stable I use an immutable spin.
The machine I'm using now represents my choices and matches what matters to me, and works closer to perfectly than all my machines in the past
And yes, I have worked with macs, and no, the UX and the entire tyranny in the Apple ecosystem was not something I could live with
And yes, this machine is fast, predictable, a joy to work with and is a tool I control, not a tool to control me. If something happens to it, I can order the part with the same price that goes into a new machine, and keep using my laptop
"We vote with our wallet, so don't complain" is a bad take in my opinion.
Like, for phones, I want a phone which runs Linux, has NFC support, and also has iMessage so my friend who only communicates with blue-bubbles and will never message a green-bubble will still talk to me. I also want it to have regulatory approval in the country I live in so I can legally use it to make calls.
Because apple has closed the iMessage ecosystem such that a linux phone can't use it, such a device is impossible. I cannot vote for it.
As such, I will complain about every phone I own for the foreseeable future.
> Like, for phones, I want a phone which runs Linux, has NFC support, and also has iMessage so my friend who only communicates with blue-bubbles and will never message a green-bubble will still talk to me. I also want it to have regulatory approval in the country I live in so I can legally use it to make calls.
I actually agree with you, but I also suggest getting better friends.
What is the blue and green bubble thing? I've never used an iPhone so don't understand the term. Does it classify messages as iMessage and non-iMessage?
iOS has two built-in messaging apps. Like all phones, they have SMS built in, and hardly anyone uses it for anything except SMS 2FA codes.
And then they have iMessage, aka blue bubbles, which are kinda like Signal or Whatsapp or Telegram. Everyone in Europe uses whatsapp, and a lot of people in the US use iMessage. If you don't use whatsapp in europe, you'll have a rough time communicating with some social groups, and the same thing for iMessage in the US.
However, unlike every other messenger app I can think of, iMessage isn't cross platform.
Also unlike every other messenger I can think of, it comes installed by default and for some reason uses the same app as the SMS app, and also claims encryption but randomly switches to SMS and breaks encryption making it obviously the least secure of all the apps (and also backs up your keys to iCloud in a way apple can access them by default, neither here nor there).
Blue bubbles are when iMessage is acting as the iMessage app, and has encryption and can use features like sending high resolution photos, location, invites, and a bunch of other apple-specific features.
Green bubbles are when the iMessage app has converted itself into the SMS and RCS app, and has a reduced feature set, like being unable to remove people from group chats.
It's frankly a quite confusing decision to have two quite different apps built into the same app and indicate which feature-set is active based on the color of a UI element. I think everyone would prefer if apple split it into the 'Messages' app (SMS + RCS) and an optional 'iMessage' app which doesn't come installed by default, but you can download on the app store from Apple. I'm frankly surprised the EU hasn't forced apple to show a prompt for "default messenger app" on startup with the options being "Whatsapp", "iMessage", etc etc, like they do for default browser.
No, Apple has one built-in messaging app: Messages. It switches between SMS, RCS, and iMessage automatically depending on the capabilities of the devices.
> I think everyone would prefer if apple split it into the 'Messages' app (SMS + RCS) and an optional 'iMessage' app which doesn't come installed by default, but you can download on the app store from Apple.
No, I don't think anyone would prefer that. People on iOS like iMessage, not SMS + RCS. Nobody is confused by it, they all know that green bubbles means you're texting someone who doesn't have an iPhone. It works seamlessly, it's just annoying when you want to have along conversation with a friend on Android because it doesn't have any nice iMessage extras available – that's why people don't like green bubbles.
reply