Entertainment and Technology Converge

The mul­ti­year agree­ments between HP and Dream­works mark a big spot­light on the increas­ing over­lap between tech­nol­ogy and entertainment..

Hewlett-Packard Co., in a bid to tap the enter­tain­ment indus­try, has signed deals with Dream­Works SKG and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Broth­ers to jointly develop and mar­ket tech­nol­ogy solu­tions tai­lored for Hol­ly­wood studios.

HP will sup­ply com­put­ing power to movie stu­dio Dream­Works SKG for Shrek 2 ani­ma­tion work and help Warner Bros. Stu­dios restore films, the com­puter maker plans to announce Monday.

The mul­ti­year agree­ments focus on the cre­ation and man­age­ment of dig­i­tal con­tent, such as ren­der­ing ani­ma­tion and dig­i­tally restor­ing old films. Terms of the deals aren't pub­licly dis­closed, but they high­light the increas­ing over­lap between tech­nol­ogy and enter­tain­ment, some­thing HP has made its mind about.

H-P has worked with enter­tain­ment com­pa­nies in the past, but pri­mar­ily on spe­cific, shorter-term projects. In another exam­ple of the trend, Apple Com­puter Inc. worked with record­ing stu­dios to offer its iTunes Music Store, a legal down­load music service.

Hol­ly­wood exec­u­tives, too, are increas­ingly inter­ested in work­ing with tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies, as more of their work is cre­ated and stored digitally.

H-P began strength­en­ing its enter­tain­ment ties in Jan­u­ary, with its agree­ment to resell Apple's iPod digital-music player and to bun­dle Apple's iTunes soft­ware into HP per­sonal com­put­ers. Last week, HP signed a deal with Nokia Corp. to enable its mobile-phone users to receive FM radio broadcasts.

H-P's deal with Warner Broth­ers will focus on deploy­ing tech­nolo­gies to dig­i­tally restore Warner's old film library. That would allow Warner to put films such as "The Wiz­ard of Oz" on DVD. The two com­pa­nies also say they will develop tech­nol­ogy that can then be offered to other stu­dios, to improve the qual­ity of dig­i­tal films and to make film-making more efficient.

Dream­Works, mean­while, said it will rent HP's com­put­ers and stor­age via the Inter­net to make ani­ma­tion films such as "Shrek 2." This is just a step fur­ther in HP's hopes of being a "util­ity com­put­ing" leader, a vision that allows com­pa­nies to pay only for the amount of com­put­ing power they actu­ally use (also known as dis­trib­uted computing.)

Adden­dum: Looks like HP also will help mar­ket a video-conferencing sys­tem that Dream­Works developed.