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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
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Briefs: Hollywood Software, Burt Rutan Startup, Valley Home Sales

Hollywood Software has acquired Digital Cinema Systems Inc., a Santa Monica firm that has developed a digital system that allows theater owners to stream multiple films simultaneously on different screens. The Woodland Hills firm currently offers products for central servers at theaters that store digital files of movies being shown there. The acquisition adds FilmStore, a system made up of a server, a media player and software for individual screens. “In a twenty-plex theater you cannot stream from a central server because you would be streaming 20 movies and that is not possible right now,” Hollywood Software Chief Executive David Gajda said. Gajda founded Hollywood Software in 1997 as a service for movie theater owners and distributors for booking films and collecting box office receipts. He sold the business to Cinedigm Corp., in Los Angeles, in 2003 but bought it back last year with a group of investors. Hollywood Software will relocate Digital Cinema’s operation from Santa Monica to the San Fernando Valley. Terms of the deal were not announced. Aviation pioneer Burt Rutan has started a crowdfunding campaign for a startup that is developing radio-controlled aircraft. RutanRC, based in Mojave, expects to deliver models of the X-Prize winning SpaceShipOne and its carrier aircraft WhiteKnight, in November. Rutan said he wants to inspire innovation in aerospace through the use of radio controlled replicas. “Model aircraft were an important part of SpaceShipOne development and are used in many levels of testing for aviation and space exploration,” Rutan said, in a prepared statement. In 2004, SpaceShipOne took to the skies more than 320,000 feet above Mojave twice in a two-week period to win the $10 million X-Prize. Its successor vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, is being built for Virgin Galactic LLC to take passengers up to sub-orbital altitudes. The radio controlled version of SpaceShipOne measures 27 inches from nose to tail and has a wingspan of 16 ½ inches. The White Knight will have a wingspan of 6 feet. Rutan is the founder of Scaled Composites, an aircraft development company at the Mojave Air & Space Port that built SpaceShipOne and White Knight. It is now a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Corp. He retired from Scaled in 2011. San Fernando Valley home sales were up 23 percent in March from a year ago, raising hopes for an improved residential market this year, according to the San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center at Cal State Northridge. The largest increase was seen in the Central Valley, where sales were up 44 percent over last March. In contrast, there was no year-over-year change in sales in the southeast Valley submarket. A total of 1,411 homes were sold in the Valley in March, with a median price of $565,000 – up nearly 10 percent over one year ago. “While I expect year-over-year median home prices to increase, I anticipate that the rate of increase will decline as we move into the summer,” said William W. Roberts, the center’s director, in a prepared statement. The report is roughly consistent with a Southland Regional Association of Realtors report last week that found March sales rose 30 percent in the Valley from a year earlier, while the median price was up 4.2 percent to $536,500.

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