Military Entertainment Complex - The U.S. Entertainment Superpower

Though not well known, there exists a dynamic cross-fertilization between media, entertainment and defense technology: i.e., military surveillance, targeting, and weapons systems use technology that was developed primarily for motion pictures and entertainment software. In fact, the U.S. government currently employs Panavision's 300x compound zoom lens for military surveillance; and according to an interview I conducted for The Second Sight (http://www.alexaobrien.com/TheSecondSight) with Bob Harvey, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Panavision, federal contracts with the U.S. State Department are the fastest growing segment of Panavision's business.

More provocative is how Hollywood and video games drive the development of high-speed, high-resolution digital image capture, management, transmission, and display that have implications for fields where these advanced technological applications would be economically unviable to develop on their own. Entertainment software has lead to faster introduction and deployment of processors, broadband networks, and high definition disks like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. But, "IBM places value on chips made for entertainment software that goes beyond revenue and profits," says Dr. John Kelly, senior vice president and group executive for IBM Technology Group: "These chips help drive technology in other areas." The Mercury Computer's CELL based blade server, for example, can handle the requirements of sonar and radar computation for military or scientific applications, because of its ability to process real time data streams. "The Cell BE processor was originally designed for the volume home entertainment market," says Craig Lund, chief technology officer of Mercury Computer Systems, "but its architecture of nine heterogeneous on-chip cores is well-suited to the type of distributed, real-time processing that will power tomorrow's digital battlefield."

If the U.S. military is the primary global military power, and this hegemony is based on the ability of the U.S. Navy to dominate the world's oceans, then the condition of hegemony is partially based on the superior numbers and technology of U.S. naval vessels and augmented significantly by U.S. dominance in space-based reconnaissance technology, made possible by entertainment software consumers and movie goers world-wide.

Most Americans, however, are oblivious to the considerable role that content industries play in job and wealth creation - not only in terms of regional economic development and growing high-tech industry, but also in terms of U.S. global economic competitiveness:

• In fact, the media, entertainment, and cultural copyright sectors create new jobs at a rate three times faster than the remaining economy. In 2002, these sectors employed 5.48 million workers and accounted for six percent of U.S. gross domestic product. These sectors also generated $89.26 billion in export revenue - surpassing every other category including automotive, aviation, agricultural, as well as chemical and allied products.

• Foreign sales of motion pictures alone totaled $17 billion in 2002. The motion picture industry is the only U.S. sector that boasts a surplus balance of trade with every other country in the world; and the international sale of filmed entertainment plays a significant role in our nation's overall trade surplus in services.

• U.S. sales of entertainment software also totaled $8.2 billion in 2004, and U.S. game designers exported an additional $2.1 billion the same year. Deutsche Bank forecasts that global revenue for game software will grow at thirteen percent annually over the next four years, while PricewaterhouseCooper projects that the U.S. media and entertainment industries will be worth $690 billion by 2009.

This development has hastened the transformation of the U.S. economy from one based largely on information and knowledge to one driven principally by creativity. John Howkins categorizes the creative economy to include fifteen creative sectors - such as research and development, software, design, and content industries like film, music, and video games - that produce intellectual property in the form of patents, copyrights, trademarks and proprietary designs. The annual global revenue for Howkin's fifteen identified sectors was $2.24 trillion in 1999. The U.S. share represents forty percent of the market with revenue totaling $960 billion. The U.S. share also accounts for more than forty percent of research and development, forty percent of television and radio, and thirty percent of film. Howkins calculates that core copyright industries will be worth $6.1 trillion internationally in fifteen years. U.S. dominance in these segments - more than productivity improvements related to new technology and new manufacturing methods - is responsible for much of the nation's global economic competitiveness since the nineteen-eighties.