Symbonic improves collaboration for entertainment creative and business teams

Collaboration is critical in the entertainment industry, but it's also tricky and challenging because you are dealing with ideas on top of ideas and a constant journey to get the right relationships and people attached to your projects and deals. It's like alchemy.

Collaboration in developing and selling projects and deals in the entertainment industry is critical to success, especially in a post-pandemic world. Dealing with a mountain of ideas and the arduous journey just to get in front of the right people all in the hopes of getting them attached to your project or deal is utter chaos. But with the right tools, this chaos becomes alchemy.

With the release of our new workspace and dashboard switcher, Symbonic now offers the ability to easily share and collaborate within, between, or across companies and teams of all kinds. It's how the entertainment and media industry already does business, we've just made the process easier.

We're Online and At Home

As we emerge from the last nineteen months into this new post-pandemic landscape, we are primarily still working at home and online. Our world, and how we work, have changed, but if you inspect a little closer, Hollywood tools and processes remain largely the same. That's a problem.

An event like a pandemic was strong enough to disrupt our day-to-day life. Eventually, once we moved past bread baking and bingeing on TV, solutions for working from home were found for this temporary pause. This occurrence affirmed that we have the ability to largely work from home. Work can be accomplished from anywhere with a wifi connection.

Unique to the entertainment industry was the pressure for new content with the onslaught of increased media consumption. People were at home, wanted to be entertained and reruns weren't going to cut it. It was imperative to figure out how to move projects along and get organized so when stay-at-home orders were lifted, production could begin immediately. Technology and remote options were the only solution. The pandemic was a catalyst for the future of the Hollywood workplace.

Individuals and companies that were able to pivot to online work were more successful. Reduced commute time translated into more time to develop content and thus produce more. Scheduling a video call instead of traveling across town or taking a flight cut down on time wasted, while also being more environmentally friendly. The ability to perform live collaboration was further enhanced as well as a better overall work-life balance.

This massive shift is occurring within the industry with the benefits outweighing the drawbacks: productivity can be achieved from home. Having the right tools to make your workflow adaptable is essential to the change.

Along with the race to figure out how to accomplish work was the acceleration of digital consumption. According to PQ Media consumers averaged 53.1 hours per week in 2020 for media consumed. The popularity of digital media has ushered in the emerging era of the creator economy, signaling how rapidly the entertainment industry is expanding.

Tiktok has become a primary driving force, with the company now citing more than 1 billion monthly active global users. Fortune notes that “Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Twitch, and even Pinterest, are all vying for their share of a market valued at north of $104 billion”. Clearly investors are starting to take note. James Murdoch’s Lupa System recently help raise $75 million in Series C financing for French digital media firm Brut. which targets Gen Z and millennials. Moreover, powerhouse agencies are losing agents to influencer focused agencies.

The creator economy brought in a swath of entrepreneurs, influencers, streamers, and online creators seeking to capitalize on newfound stardom by growing their platform and building a brand. This sector is growing at unprecedented rates; CB insights reported $1.3 billion raised by creator-focused companies in 2021 with the numbers projected to only skyrocket from there.

Amidst this uncharted territory is a sea of chaos. Astronomical growth, spurred by the pandemic, permanently changes the fabric of the entertainment and media industry. Joe Russo of the Russo brothers and AGBO discussed the changing environment with Deadline remarking that “You get more money to make [movies] digitally….Movies are going to evolve, I’m not sure what theaters will look like but I know it’s going to be more premium.” The digital era is creating a ripple effect, signaling that staying organized and keeping projects under control is fundamental.

Well, okay, collaboration has always mattered, but with remote working and a new frontier of development, collaboration across your team is vital to success. When your team is fully informed and materials are accessible, fluid communication follows, allowing efficiency and cooperation to prevail which is what you'll need in order to sort through the mess and mitigate any confusion.

You need the right tools to harness and reduce the chaos and complexity of transformation. Symbonic is designed to service the pain points experienced throughout the project development path. Productivity tools like Dropbox and Google force users to adapt to the software capabilities whereas we understand the development process and have created solutions for entertainment-specific problems. Symbonic is made for entertainment and media professionals.

Sometimes you want your idea to be kept to yourself until it is ready. Sometimes you have a bunch of different collaborators in different companies moving your project forward.

Symbonic lets you do both and anything in between.

Whatever your unique requirements are, Symbonic workspaces can be configured to match your team, staff, and company regardless of size.

While workspaces allow you to establish teams and structure the way you do business, projects and profiles create containers for big ideas, ventures, programs, talent, and brands of any kind.

Similar to workspaces, you can share projects with your internal team as well as the external team and you can share them with people with different permissions.

And just like in the real business of entertainment, it allows people to come in and out of the project BUT with the advantage of maintaining integrity to the information and progress for the team to carry on.