So, it's started...

A few years ago, I commented this on a COW forum "I know that you're all wanting prices to drop so you can get into the business a lot cheaper than us old timers did, just a few years back. Well, if prices keep dropping, all of the profit will go away and companies will not survive and we won't have anything to buy. Before long, all of the product will dry up and we will be willing to pay anything for get what we need. We'll be buying on a street corner from a guy with a trench coat. No company can stay in business if the they succumb to low bidding each other." I was talking about SCSI hard drives at the time. As a consequence, drives now cost almost nothing and everybody is cheering about how little they paid for a 1 Terabyte drive. If you were making hard drives and had to make money to stay in business, you would be sweating right now."

ProMax needed to make a substantial profit to stay in business and the profit margins are gone.

Also, a few years back, I made this statement "It seems like some people are screaming that we shouldn't go to war over oil. Well, if we don't fight for oil, it will double in price and the pump price will double or triple right along with it. It will make very little difference to me because it's a small percentage of our overhead. The people who will suffer are the blue collar guy, the waitress at Denny's and the school teacher who drives across town to her low paying job." At that time, a barrel of oil was $53. Today, it's $125. In two years, maybe $250 a barrel. Why would the Emerates ever lower their price? I wouldn't, and neither would any of you.

Fast forward to 2012. HD cameras are $300 and everyone owns one. Laptop computers have 12 Tb of solid state memory that can handle any HD signal and what do we have? The 21 year old kids will underbid the people who are now cranking out video at $75 and our services will be worth nothing because they will be teaching video production and editing in grade school.

Lastly, because all of the companies advertising on this page have now gone out of business, Ron and Kathleen will retire and the COW will be gone. At that point, there is no further reason to live. Then what?




Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It's a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .