Apple Goes to Hollywood: For more than just TV production
Apple have had offices in Los Angeles for many years. The number of Apple employees in the area rose significantly when the company bought Beats Music in 2014. Now it looks like there’ll be more to the LA operation than music.
The Financial Times reports [paywall link] that Apple are looking for more space in Culver City, Los Angeles County. The FT say that Apple is thinking of leasing space at The Culver Studios. Culver City isn’t exactly close to Hollywood, but from a production perspective, it counts as Hollywood: both Gone With the Wind and Citizen Kane were filmed at The Culver Studios.
The FT headline ‘Apple eyes iconic studio as base for Hollywood production push’ implies that they want space to make high-end TV and feature films – including bidding to produce a TV show for Netflix. Interesting that they suggest that Apple plan to make TV for others – instead of commissioning others to make TV for them. That would mean Apple investing in the hardware and infrastructure to make high-end TV directly.
Office space for…
However, the body of the article says that Apple is primarily looking for office space. It seems that the large amount of office space that Beats lease won’t be enough. It could be that Apple Music administration needs more people (The Culver Studios is only 15 minutes walk from Beats). On the hand, what else could Apple be doing in LA?
They certainly need to need to hire enough new staff to be involved in their $1bn push into TV. They could be based in Los Angeles County.
Part of the Mac team seems to be based in Culver City. A recent vacancy listed on the Apple jobs site was for an expert to set up a post production workflow lab in Culver City. That is likely to be primarily about making sure the next iteration of the Mac Pro fits the future needs of Hollywood TV and film production:
Help shape the future of the Mac in the creative market. The Macintosh team is seeking talented technical leadership in a System Architecture team. This is an individual contributor role. The ideal candidate has core competencies in one or more professional artists content creation areas with specific expertise in video, and photo, audio, and 3D animation.
The pro workflow expert will be responsible for thoroughly comprehending all phases of professional content creation, working closely with 3rd party apps developers and some key customers, thoroughly documenting, and working with architects to instrument systems for performance analysis.
It seems that some of Apple’s ProApps team is based in Culver City too. Recent job openings for a Video Applications Graphics Engineering Intern and a Senior macOS/iOS Software Engineer for Video Applications are based there.
Also, if I was going to develop a VR and AR content business, it might be a good idea to create custom-designed studio resources for VR and AR content production. Los Angeles would be a good location to experiment with the future of VR and AR.