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As long as I am given the option to purchase content without advertisements I will do so. If I can't watch a piece of content without ads, I'll either wait unti

by qppo 7y ago

As long as I am given the option to purchase content without advertisements I will do so. If I can't watch a piece of content without ads, I'll either wait until I can or pirate it. Usually the former. Frankly I think content is just overvalued and the actual creation of content is extremely inefficient, from a financial point of view. My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money. It's honestly a terrible industry and needs to be disrupted. Market distortion is the only reason films cost what they do, from production to distribution and consumption. And literally everyone in the pipeline has an incentive to keep the market distorted, except people who watch content. Thank god for piracy.

akhosravian 7y ago
I’d be interested in hearing more about what you mean by market distortion here. A lot of the silliness in things like how much stars are paid seems applicable to software development — tiny incremental value adds become very substantial with a large enough audience.
- qppo 7y ago
  I don't know what it is off the top of my head but I think actor pay isn't that big a slice of the cost. What I mean by market distortion is really the lack of insight into value creation. How much value is created by whom in the pipeline, essentially. Data driven, direct to consumer enterprises are changing this a bit and that's great. But my experience is that data doesn't change minds of the top stakeholders, and there are incentives to make decisions that are bad for consumers even if the data says that both sides can win.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money. Is it that, or is the industry mind-controlled by parasites to achieve a different goal than delivering quality entertainment cost-effectively? "Hollywood accounting" is a known term, and it doesn't describe being bad at making money - it describes being very good at making money for yourself by purposefully cheating those who actually brought in that money. (My general heuristic is that, if they're inefficiencies persisting despite competitive pressure, it's because it's these inefficiencies that are the real reason the business is done, and someone is making a good money off them.)
- qppo 7y ago
  "Hollywood accounting" isn't designed to cheat anyone. It has been used to do so in the past, mostly decades ago. Slight difference. It refers to the fact that a film as an enterprise is designed as an independent business with equity held by a few investors, and the enterprise gets dissolved when the film finishes post production. It's the only financial model that actually makes sense when you consider how a film is made and by whom. A small group of money people front a large amount of capital to pay hundreds to thousands of subcontractors up front to create an asset with intangible value, and they split the rights to that asset when they're done. Some of the subcontractors gets something that looks like equity, most don't. It is a source of problems and inefficiencies. But to me the big issues lie before pre and after post, a lot of the work and structure of businesses during the creation of a film is pretty well honed and workers do have different kinds of power than most employees in traditional environments. Also films are totally different than television and other media, at least financially. Studios work differently than networks.

by qppo 7y ago

akhosravian 7y ago

I’d be interested in hearing more about what you mean by market distortion here. A lot of the silliness in things like how much stars are paid seems applicable to software development — tiny incremental value adds become very substantial with a large enough audience.

qppo 7y ago
I don't know what it is off the top of my head but I think actor pay isn't that big a slice of the cost. What I mean by market distortion is really the lack of insight into value creation. How much value is created by whom in the pipeline, essentially. Data driven, direct to consumer enterprises are changing this a bit and that's great. But my experience is that data doesn't change minds of the top stakeholders, and there are incentives to make decisions that are bad for consumers even if the data says that both sides can win.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> My personal experience has been that Hollywood film/television studios are poorly run businesses with massive losses at each point in the process, but is laden down by individuals who do things because it's the way it's always been done, are hostile to innovation (both technology and in business), and are anti-consumer, anti-viewer, and frankly anti-making-money. Is it that, or is the industry mind-controlled by parasites to achieve a different goal than delivering quality entertainment cost-effectively? "Hollywood accounting" is a known term, and it doesn't describe being bad at making money - it describes being very good at making money for yourself by purposefully cheating those who actually brought in that money. (My general heuristic is that, if they're inefficiencies persisting despite competitive pressure, it's because it's these inefficiencies that are the real reason the business is done, and someone is making a good money off them.)

qppo 7y ago
"Hollywood accounting" isn't designed to cheat anyone. It has been used to do so in the past, mostly decades ago. Slight difference. It refers to the fact that a film as an enterprise is designed as an independent business with equity held by a few investors, and the enterprise gets dissolved when the film finishes post production. It's the only financial model that actually makes sense when you consider how a film is made and by whom. A small group of money people front a large amount of capital to pay hundreds to thousands of subcontractors up front to create an asset with intangible value, and they split the rights to that asset when they're done. Some of the subcontractors gets something that looks like equity, most don't. It is a source of problems and inefficiencies. But to me the big issues lie before pre and after post, a lot of the work and structure of businesses during the creation of a film is pretty well honed and workers do have different kinds of power than most employees in traditional environments. Also films are totally different than television and other media, at least financially. Studios work differently than networks.