Free Agent Media

The Baltimore Sun reports that larger video and audio production companies have been closing, with networks of independent producers emerging in their place.

An excerpt:

Don Barto Sr. has seen the transformation firsthand. A local sound engineer who has been in the industry for more than three decades and in 1998 founded Soundriven Inc., Barto used to work out of large, traditional studios "using the kind of stuff you would see in a recording studio for making records."

"And now that's all migrated to a computer, and I sit here on my sofa and mix TV shows," he said.

When he worked at those studios, Barto used equipment that cost upward of a half-million dollars, he said. Four years ago, he bought a new system for his Timonium home-based business that cost $6,500 per workstation. The gear -- which Barto says is so small that he can work from anywhere -- paid for itself in a month, he said.

Some of the best parts of the article are the resentful quotes from the old guard. "The digital technology has come down in price and to the masses so that everyone thinks they can get in our business," the president of one closing company told the paper. "One guy, one computer, out of his home, is competing with what I do."