Curated playlist
Entertainment companies based in California
- The Walt Disney CompanyThe Walt Disney Company began not as an empire but as a $1,500 contract. In 1923, a young animator named Walt Disney signed a deal with New York film distributor Margaret J. Winkler to produce six series of short films called Alice…
- Sony Pictures Home EntertainmentSony Pictures Home Entertainment released its first twenty titles in November 1979, not under the Sony name but under the banner of Columbia Pictures Home Entertainment. The company that would eventually carry the Sony brand into living…
- Universal PicturesUniversal Pictures was founded on the 30th of April 1912, making it the oldest surviving film studio in the United States. Nine men put their names to that founding act: Carl Laemmle, Mark Dintenfass, Charles O. Baumann, Adam Kessel, Pat…
- Paramount PicturesParamount Pictures was founded on the 8th of May 1912, making it older than almost every film studio on earth. Only a handful of European companies and one American rival, Universal Pictures, can claim a longer history. Yet what makes…
- Universal Music GroupUniversal Music Group holds a catalogue of over three million recordings and four million compositions, making it the largest music company on the planet. It sits alongside Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group as one of the…
- DirecTVOn the 17th of June 1994, the first direct broadcast satellite service went live in the United States. Hughes Electronics had spent years developing the technology to deliver digital television directly to homes without cable lines.…
- Walt Disney Studios (division)Walt Disney Studios was founded on October the 16th, 1923, and today it stands as the largest film studio in Hollywood, a place whose history stretches back over a century. In 2019, this single division posted a global box office record of…
- Touchstone PicturesTouchstone Pictures was the secret weapon Walt Disney Company never quite admitted to having. On the 15th of February 1984, Disney CEO Ron W. Miller quietly signed a label into existence, chosen from over 1,200 candidate names, and the…
- Warner Bros. PicturesWarner Bros. Pictures was founded on the 4th of April, 1923, by four brothers: Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack L. Warner. What began as a family operation in New Castle, Pennsylvania, grew into one of the most durable institutions in American…
- Skydance MediaSkydance Media took its name from a flying technique. David Ellison, a licensed pilot, drew inspiration from aerobatics called "skydancing" when he founded the company on the 4th of April 2006. The name was a clue to what the company would…
- Twitch (service)Twitch is an American live-streaming platform that began its life in June 2011 not as a standalone product, but as a calculated spin-off carved out of a broader, general-interest site called Justin.tv. The question that defined its early…
- Sony Pictures TelevisionSony Pictures Television traces its roots not to Sony at all, but to a small outfit called Pioneer Telefilms, founded in 1947 by Ralph Cohn, whose father Jack and uncle Harry had co-founded Columbia Pictures. Columbia bought the company…
- Viz MediaViz Media commands nearly a quarter of the graphic novel market in the United States, yet the company traces back to a single man from Tokushima Prefecture who moved to California in 1975 with no particular plan to change American reading…
- United ArtistsUnited Artists was born from an act of rebellion. On the 5th of February 1919, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith signed papers creating a company that would put creative power directly in the hands of…
- LucasfilmGeorge Lucas established Lucasfilm on the 10th of December 1971 in San Rafael, California. The company began with just five employees working out of a small office. By the mid-1970s, operations had moved to the Universal Studios Lot in Los…
- Critical Role ProductionsCritical Role Productions launched a Kickstarter campaign on the 4th of March, 2019, with a modest ask: help fund a 22-minute animated short. The campaign closed on the 19th of April. Backers had sent $11.3 million. That placed the effort…
- Anonymous ContentAnonymous Content runs out of Los Angeles, with additional offices in Culver City, New York City and London. That international footprint supports work across film, television and other forms of media production. Over more than two…
- Electronic ArtsElectronic Arts began with a meeting in February 1982, when Trip Hawkins walked into the offices of Sequoia Capital and pitched a company he was calling Amazin' Software. Don Valentine, the venture capitalist on the other side of the…
- Urban VisionUrban Vision Entertainment Inc. set up shop in Los Angeles in July 1996 with a single, specific ambition: bring Japanese animation into the American mainstream. At the time, anime occupied a fringe corner of the American market, passed…