Gigabit hub anchors new creative media community on Oahu

If you build it, they will cluster.

Cliche or not, it’s exactly how economic development clusters work. Take the new creative media hub at Hawaii’s Foreign Trade Zone on Ala Moana Boulevard, across from Restaurant Row.

In late 2015, GVS (Global Virtual Studio) Transmedia Accelerator opened a branch in Honolulu called GVS Connect, a public-­private partnership with the Hawaii Strategic Development Corp., equipped with a dedicated multigigabit private fiber line.

Sited at the Foreign Trade Zone’s new Homer A. Maxey International Trade Resource Center, the gigabit hub is outfitted to provide a collaborative work environment with workstations, plush couches, two giant televisions and state-of-the-art web cameras that allow for secure high- definition videoconferencing unlike anything else available on island.

The new collaborative workspace — and especially the private gigabit fiber connection — piqued the interest of other local creative media businesses, especially those that deal with large files that often stall out when using regular business broadband. By early 2016 local video production companies such as Berad Studios and Bonzai Media had moved into adjacent offices.

Meanwhile, the GVS room has several desks for co- working. One of the accelerator’s Honolulu-based graduates is headquartered there, as are the producers of a forthcoming movie about the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

Visiting Hollywood productions also see the benefit of a local space for virtual collaboration and the capability to securely upload their video files.

The gigabit connection also spawned new startups, like Vault Support. They took a room across the hall and are working for a Netflix-­owned Japanese reality show, uploading daily footage to editors in Tokyo. The latest venture to join the creative media cluster has been Gripsmith, which offers production assistance and equipment rental to visiting TV and movie productions.

Hawaii’s Creative Industries Division, part of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, occupies two offices on the corridor and uses it to run the Creative Labs incubator program.

“The draw was really the GVS hub,” explains FTZ Administrator David Sikkink. “When you get a group of people together, even if they’re competitors, they start to talk in the hallways. Their doors are open, and you start to generate that community of people who are bouncing ideas off each other. We saw that really work in this side of the new facility and our older site, too.”

Even before GVS Connect opened on Oahu, the original GVS Transmedia Accelerator location in Kailua-Kona, which also has multigigabit capacity, saw a similar thing happen. Once it opened its doors, media professionals and freelancers started renting space in its building and next door.

There’s the accelerator, a Hollywood-quality green screen and professional sound studio, a production equipment rental company and a stunt school next door run by an A-list Hollywood stuntman.

GVS says it has 10 resident companies working out of the studio and between 20 and 30 independent contractors working on various projects. The building’s about to get a new TV studio and editing suite, too, thanks to Big Island public-access station Na Leo, which just bought the building.

That’s how economic development works: Government invests to build critical infrastructure, which turns into community assets that attract other private businesses to set up shop around them.

Hawaii needs all the help it can get when it comes to shedding its anti-business reputation. In these examples, the gigabit fiber in Hono­lulu and the accelerator program in Kona show how making strategic investments in key infrastructure and business acceleration programs can help anchor these centers for new business growth.

Sara Lin, formerly a journalist in New York, Los Angeles and Honolulu, is now the associate with the Hawaii Strategic Development Corp. Reach her at sara.n.lin@hawaii.gov.