12 ms·

The death throes of an industry

52 points by hawke 15y ago

Tyrant505 15y ago
Your formatting got screwed on a copy/paste I assume, bit difficult to read.
- jacquesm 15y ago
  Indeed it was, thank you for noticing that, it should be fixed now.
- paulsutter 15y ago
  Couldn't all of the mobile apps our friends are writing fit onto that same disk drive? With room to spare for the source code to Facebook and Google? Does that indicate that the entire intellectual property business is in its "death throes"? You could also include all the credit card numbers and ACH information for all the accounts in the world on that same drive. I guess that means its OK to use those numbers? How can so many software guys really believe that their bits are more valuable than the bits created by media companies? Or that stealing is "ok" just because it's easy if you know how? The media industry has done a shit job of making its product easy to buy or making money ad supported. They're in decline because they have done such a bad job adapting. But someone will figure it out. Entertainment will definitely evolve, but it won't go away. There's a lot more to learn reading pg's request for ideas than reading pro-piracy posts like this that seem to litter hacker news.
  - jacquesm 15y ago
    The big difference is between stuff that you release and stuff that you don't. Once released bits become common knowledge and they lose a large amount of their potential value because the scarcity element is instantly gone. This is one of the driving engines behind the the whole software-as-a-service game, it gets rid of the problem of piracy and it turns the product into a subscription rather than a one-time sale. No second hand version of google docs will ever be sold.
    - paulsutter 15y ago
      Paid mobile apps are widely released, and people I know make a living selling them. Is anyone who buys a mobile app a chump? And what about the ACH information? If you came across that sort of data you would feel free to use it to transfer a few million bucks to your own account? It would be just as easy as copying a movie. So if the data is out there, you are arguing that it's OK to do that?
      - jacquesm 15y ago
        > Paid mobile apps are widely released, and people I know make a living selling them. Is anyone who buys a mobile app a chump? You used google and facebook as an example, they are clearly not releasing binaries but are in the service industry. Mobile applications (which I think are a transient phenomenon that will evaporate when mobile web applications will be more viable, the same happened with desktop software, with some notable exceptions) are already pirated wholesale (see http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20107572-94/how-piracy-ruins-it-for-paid-apps-inside-apps/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20107572-94/how-piracy-ruin...) that doesn't make the writers of mobile software 'chumps', but it does mean that they will have to factor this in or they will likely be hurt. > It would be just as easy as copying a movie, and the data is out there, so you are arguing that it's OK to do that? No, obviously I'm not arguing that it is ok to do that.
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
  - ajscherer 15y ago
    Software is not analogous because it has been developed from the very start with the knowledge that the bits would be easily copy-able, and has been designed accordingly. I remember being asked to type in phrases from a game instruction manual at least a decade before anyone was consuming commercial audio or video on their PC. Furthermore, software is an interactive medium, which makes copy protection easier, and copying riskier. It isn't clear to me how you could make copy protection inherently part of music (without ruining it). Even if you fully controlled all the hardware and software used for playback, you wouldn't control the link between the speaker and my ears. As to ACH information, it depends on what you mean by "use those numbers," since they have no inherent value. If you mean reading them for fun, I would be OK with that. If you mean using them to drain money from people's bank accounts, that would not be okay, but it also wouldn't be copying (since the original would be destroyed). If you knew of a way to copy money from one account to another, I would be completely fine with you copying my checking account in full. I know you would probably prefer that people think about stealing and unauthorized copying as the same thing, but there is a difference and it's important. One is completely physically undetectable to the victim, and the other isn't. How can you tell the difference between your CD selling poorly because people are pirating it, and it selling poorly because it sucks? Without widespread snooping on other peoples' electronic communications, you can't. If someone drained your bank account it would be trivial to detect.
    - paulsutter 15y ago
      I agree that draconian laws or snooping measures are not reasonable mechanisms to enforce copyright. But the analogy to mobile is interesting. Mobile app revenues are absolutely booming, and mobile apps dont require inconvenient or invasive protection schemes. Mobile apps are easier to buy than pirate, and they are reasonably priced. It's bizarre to me that most of the good content isn't available for streaming, when I'd be perfectly happy to pay per view. I dont have any media in my home. It's all streamed. My friends who pirate all deal with torrents and file conversions and moving files around. And honestly I dont have time for that. It's far cheaper just to pay for it. Or not watch it at all, because most of the good content isn't available for streaming. Which is the real problem.
  - guard-of-terra 15y ago
    "the bits created by media companies" They don't. Media companies don't write songs, neither they're really shoot movies. They are the middlemen. Yes, I think that my bits are more valuable than the vapor created by middlemen. But there's more important issue: Once I have 100000 books, 1000000 songs and 10000 movies on my hard drives, I might lose desire to have any of their bits at all. I don't even need them produced because the bits already there are just as fine.
    - paulsutter 15y ago
      There are a lot of super smart guys working day and night to create movies, and they're solving a lot of hard technical challenges and applying many decades of experience in what makes a production entertaining. While I dont watch a lot of TV or see a lot of movies, I certainly respect the impressive work that goes into them.
crusso 15y ago
The business model will definitely evolve with all the digitization and internet pressures. Claiming that the industry is exhibiting "death throes" is way way way premature, though. The way I look at it, government power and spending are on the rise. Meanwhile, big media continues to be very important to politics, both as a source of money and as a source of star power for re-elections. Those two forces working together will be extraordinarily difficult to kill. Like a many-headed hydra, we'll whack off a head or two, but the darned thing will keep fighting for its existence.
nyellin 15y ago
I'm not convinced this is a global issue. Here in Israel, many local TV shows are freely available on the internet, including the ever-popular Eretz Nehederet. Plenty of Israelis pirate content, but the local media industry seems to be doing fine. I can't recall any attempts to crack down on pirates, let alone attempts to pass draconian anti-piracy legislation. This is all anecdotal. If someone knows where to find the data supporting or contradicting this, please post.
- vectorpush 15y ago
  I'm not convinced this is a global issue. I wouldn't be so sure. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-17355203 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-1735520...
  - nyellin 15y ago
    Yes, the death throes of the American media industry are a global problem. However, evidence is needed to prove that the global media industry is dying.
    - vectorpush 15y ago
      Ah, I see what you mean. In that case it's not even an American problem since Hollywood is doing quite well. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-again-fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...
PaulHoule 15y ago
This is big talk, but in the meantime I went to the gym the other day and checked out the movies for sale and bought a Blu-Ray of the Truman Show for $7.99. I went home and played it, there were no annoying trailers or anything. Me, my son, and the reporter who's always writing about our coven in the newspaper all watched it and had a great time. Hollywood offers consumers many chump choices (like bloated cable packages) but it also offers good value too. Hollywood leads the world in producing compelling content and it's always been smart about turning it into money -- I'm sure things are going to change in the next 20 years, but odds are good that some fraction of Hollywood is going to stay on top.
- paulsutter 15y ago
  I think jaquesm's point below about mobile apps is (accidentally) a great point. People are happy to pay for media when it's easy to do so. Mobile apps are pirated only rarely because it's so easy to buy them. That's why they're growing like crazy. Hollywood's mistake has been to make it so difficult to buy media. So few movies and shows are available for streaming, for example. There's a great opportunity in helping shape the future of entertainment.
- odnamra 15y ago
  I love this. You are correct on all accounts. In theory, creating a movie is about telling a story with the best possible content and the best possible experience. You might laugh at the thought, but I can promise you that all filmmakers toil under that aspiration. Actors, hair, makeup, wardrobe, location, sfx, vfx, audio, music... ALL handcrafted and laboriously created in pursuit of telling the story as best you can. Theaters, Blu-ray, Dolby, HD, 3D, all developed in the hopes of creating the best possible experience for that content. I'm not saying there isn't a lot of crap (lord knows I've personally worked on many terrible movies), but I'm speaking of ideals here. Shall we Kill Hollywood and replace everything with cat videos on Youtube? That's too easy. I can offer many suggestions on how to vindictively kill Hollywood right now, but that would be a disservice to people like you who just want to enjoy watching a movie. And it's because Hollywood contains this fantastic talent base, and enormous back catalog, that they will be around for a long time to come.
benologist 15y ago
You're envisioning a future where you replace the middlemen you don't like with a set of ones you do like, that aren't up to the job anyway. Marketplaces have existed for years in various forms - iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, TPB, MegaUpload etc ... their users are almost exclusively interested in Big Content stuff. Mininova highlights this - they went legit and right now 135 people are downloading their most popular video, 70 times fewer than the number of people currently downloading the 4th Mission Impossible rip which is pretty much the very definition of Big Content easy, safe fluff. Mininova was one of the most popular websites in the world before they went legitimate - this isn't people not knowing, this is people not caring. Kickstarter-ish models for production is just surreal - it is the complete opposite of on demand and that's a critical component for the future. The overall premise that the RIAA/MPAA are or have to die at all is pretty sketchy - the problem is they're predatory and not keeping up with technology and consumers, not that they're redundant.
- jacquesm 15y ago
  > Kickstarter-ish models for production is just surreal - it is the complete opposite of on demand and that's a critical component for the future. Tell that to these guys: http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/the-kickstarter-film-festival http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/the-kickstarter-film-festiva... I'd happily pay for Pat Metheny to produce his next album before I can get my hands on it with a mechanism in place that would revert the money if he never released it, and even without that mechanism I'd take the risk.
  - benologist 15y ago
    Yeah it works when it's novel, now imagine that it's normal ... instead of going to Netflix and streaming a movie tonight you go to kickstarter-for-movies.com and book what you're hopefully going to watch for Christmas. I cannot imagine a worse way to be entertained, it actually returns us to the pre-internet days with the added plus of gambling on and paying in advance for everything we want.
    - rosser 15y ago
cstross 15y ago
An industry is dying ... That industry is the media industry That's a spectacularly vague assertion. Let me give you a more pointed one: there is no such thing as the media industry. In [textual] publishing alone there are at least a dozen different highly specialized industries that, aside from a common technology base (the printing press) are radically different in structure and operation. And that's within any one language/nation; if you look at, say, mass-audience consumer movies, is it reasonable to stretch and assertion that "the movies are dying" to cover both Hollywood and Bollywood, much less crowdsourced low budget SF epics from Finland and state-subsidized art films from France? (I'll agree that the MPAA and RIAA are parasitic and preside over a business model that doesn't appear to be long-term viable without lobbying for government support -- but that's not the same thing at all, and I really wish pundits like Mattheij would be a bit more circumspect in their predictions.)
- jacquesm 15y ago
  You're right! That's why you're the writer and I'm the (very much part time) blogger I guess. I'll try to be more precise in the future, the media industry is indeed a much too broad brush. This bit started out as an email I wrote to myself a while ago and then posted in response to another thread on HN, I should have done a better job of sharpening it before posting it.
  - cstross 15y ago
    Oh, right. My gut feeling, FWIW, is that the internet is a communications medium that tends to disintermediate supply chains; because it makes it really easy for people to locate sources of supply, a lot of traditional middlemen suddenly discover that nobody needs them. But that doesn't mean there won't be any middlemen; merely that the buggy-whip vendors will be replaced by the folks who understand how to sell automobile seat covers (if you'll permit me to stretch the metaphor).
- jmillikin 15y ago
  The term "media industry" is not usually applied to "crowdsourced low budget SF epics from Finland and state-subsidized art films from France", any more than the term "agricultural industry" would be applied to someone's backyard herb garden. The OP did not claim that "movies are dying", he claimed that the media industry is dying, which is a completely different statement. If the media industry dies, people will still make movies, they just won't have the massive budgets that contemporary movies have. For what it's worth, I think the OP is letting his anticipation cloud his better judgment. While the media industry will certainly decrease in size and influence, and will probably become more selective about which scripts it funds, it will continue to exist so long as customers are willing to pay $20 for the experience of watching a blockbuster on a hundred-food cinema screen.
VMG 15y ago
It'd be nice to have some data to prove the assumption that the industry is dying. Not that I can't believe it but I think one should back up these kinds of claims.
guard-of-terra 15y ago
The idea of a digital stockpile of the world culture in your closet is very interesting. I already have a torrent of 100 thousand books on my mirror raid, for example, so I'm sure I won't be missing much even if they go nuclear on internet piracy. In a few years you'd be able to do the same with music and movies.
michaelpinto 15y ago
I do a great deal of work with youth marketing so I have a slightly different perspective. I can't speak to music -- but films cost a great deal of money to make, and YouTube videos just won't replace that. If you look at the next generation of consumers (kids) they're watching more broadcast television than any other demographic, they're camping out overnight to see films like the Hunger Games and this may surprise you ancient twentysomethings but these kids are actually paying for their music too. This is why Katy and Gaga are making real money, but more sophisticated music aimed at young adults isn't doing well. The biggest mistake that techies make is that they assume that their lives are the lives that everyone else leads: And this just isn't the case. Are kids spending tons of time looking at YouTube? Yes! But they're also spending hours looking at the Disney channel too and paying for songs on iTunes with that gift card that grandma got them for their birthday. Will the film and music companies go through a great deal of disruption? Very much so — but they won't be replaced by tech companies, unless those are videogame companies. The only way that tech companies will disrupt Hollywood is if they get into producing content - so far the only examples of this is Steve Jobs taking over Pixar to make films and Sony with their valuable music and film business.
- ippisl 15y ago
  Why are they paying if they can get illegal copies ? and why watch broadcast tv when they can get on-demand content ?
  - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
    Because they often don't have personal computers anymore, not as we had them. When I was a kid, I set up zsnes on the computer at my after-school program, downloaded a bunch of ROMs, and taught the kids the key-mappings. I became the Guy Who Made Video Games Run on the PC. I did it at home, rampant pirate that I was. But do today's kids actually have an unlocked PC available to them? Do they have consoles whose games come in self-contained cartridges so that piracy becomes imaginable? I don't think so. They have consoles and handhelds that work mostly via their connections to proprietary company servers. They have iPods and phones and tablets locked down with company DRM. They have Windows 7 or OS X computers at home, at school, at after-school, and in offices with actual security models that stop kids from messing around installing whatever they like. Pirating a game now involves torrenting several GBs of ISO, mod-chipping your console or installing a game crack, and then installing a crack/workaround for the network log-in based DRM (thanks, EA and Ubisoft). It's often easier just to buy the damn thing off Steam, but then you have to ask Mom and Dad for money to buy games. What kid wants to go through that ordeal? We grew up in a Wild West playground of open personal computing where little was locked, locks could be picked, and there weren't any security guards. I fear today's kids have grown up in a walled garden guarded by men with flaming swords.
deleted 15y ago
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- prodigal_erik 15y ago
  It's an archaic word, not related to throwing anything: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/throe http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/throe
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
epscylonb 15y ago
The smart people in the music industry know that to remain relevant they need to stay close to the artists. This once lopsided relationship is changing to be more equal, the record companies need the artists to make money. There is value in curation, marketing and management. I expect some of the current media companies will surive but they will look different and be much more competitive.
davidw 15y ago
> Maybe that will mean that there will be no more media superstars. Why would that be? The superstars are the ones most likely to survive in some sense. You need to 'think at the margin': http://journal.dedasys.com/2012/01/21/thinking-at-the-margin http://journal.dedasys.com/2012/01/21/thinking-at-the-margin - it's the little guys on the edge of doing their art full time or not that are the ones most likely to be buffeted around by the winds of change. The Rolling Stones will still make lots of cash somehow. Also, the ransom model has been with us for a while - it was proposed as a way to fund open source software too. So far, it hasn't worked that well (a few anecdotes notwithstanding). It can, in some cases, but most consumers want to have a look at something, evaluate it, and then get their instant gratification, not wait another N months for it to actually be produced.
DanielRibeiro 15y ago
Steven Blank made a much more in depth analysis of this phenomenon on his: Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA[1] In a nutshell, it shows how much the movie industry always fought change, it always lost, and it always made more money out it. [1] http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant-innovate-and-the-result-is-sopa/ http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant...
tsotha 15y ago
I'm not convinced that just because you'll soon be able to fit the world's entire electronic cultural output into your pocket the media companies will necessarily be out of business. They're pushing for controls on the way the rest of us consume content, and they may well be successful in the end. They don't have to be 100% successful, just successful enough to make money.
api 15y ago
I think there's a larger picture here. It's time to declare war on middlemen, period. There are producers and customers. There is no place for anything else in the 21st century. Here's a startup formula for you all: 1) Identify a place where a middleman is taking a cut or gate-keeping an industry. 2) Design a system, technology, or service that either eliminates the middleman entirely or replaces it with something far more efficient and much lower margin. 3) Profit.
- DLWormwood 15y ago
  > It's time to declare war on middlemen, period. Got a "B Ark" handy?
  - jacquesm 15y ago
    Be careful, you might end up dying from an infection contracted through an un-sanitized telephone.
  - J3L2404 15y ago
    Golgafrincham is a red semi-desert planet that is home of the Great Circling Poets of Arium and a species of particularly inspiring lichen. Its people decided it was time to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population, and so the descendants of the Circling Poets concocted a story that their planet would shortly be destroyed in a great catastrophe. (It was apparently under threat from a "mutant star goat"). The useless third of the population (consisting of hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitisers and the like) were packed into the B-Ark, one of three purported giant Ark spaceships, and told that everyone else would follow shortly in the other two. The other two thirds of the population, of course, did not follow and "led full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone". The B-Ark was programmed to crash-land on a suitably remote planet on one of the outer spiral arms of the galaxy, which happened to be Earth, and the Golgafrinchan rejects gradually mingled with and usurped the native cavemen*, becoming the ancestors of humanity and thereby altering and distorting the course of the great experiment to find the question for the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, or so Ford Prefect presumes. A lot of them didn't make it through the winter three years prior to Arthur Dent's reunion with Ford Prefect, and the few who remained in the spring said they needed a holiday and set out on a raft. History says they must have survived. People from Golgafrincham are called Golgafrinchans. In some versions of the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the planet is also referred to as "Golgafrinchan", but this usage is less common and is thought to be an error of typography.
shalakhin 15y ago
It looks like media industry has to reborn and form a new way to do business and get their income. On the other hand I like indie musicians more as they try to innovate or make music for people more than just get their money and aren't connected to labels. An interesting group – Singleton is an example.
mattchew 15y ago
I'm glad he mentioned Kickstarter. I'm really excited about the potential there. I think Kickstarter (or something like it) will be at least as important as eBay or Craigslist. I just wish we had it back when Firefly was dying.
jiggy2011 15y ago
You know, I've heard this Hollywood/The RIAA is dead meme repeated for at least 10 years now and I just don't see it happening anytime soon. Is there even any evidence that they are dying? Are their revenues falling year upon year, piracy advocates insist that they aren't. I still see trailers every year for the latest $BIG_MEDIA_MOVIE with no sign of slowing down, how many movies you can fit on a 4TB drive is pretty irrelevant. Since the original iPod came out people have been able to store more music than they actually listen to anyway. Anyway, what would replace it? Youtube? Half of their content is either scenes from TV/Movies or people talking about TV/Movies. Kickstarter? Yes for folks who are passionate enough to think about what they want and go out actively looking for stuff they might like. Many people just want to see a trailer for latest big blockbuster so that they know what to buy for their kids when they want some peace and quiet or what to talk about at the watercooler on monday. What about piracy? Everyone seems to be firmly of the opinion that the cat can not be put back in the back with this one. Me, I'm not so sure. The feds are going after pirate websites with the big guns. Not to mention that on the whole the people who make your software and hardware are on the side of the content producers. Since we are all going "Post PC" and many computers will become more like appliances, what's to say that your future Apple TV will even play any content that has not been directly licensed from iTunes and the like? Look at the MSN Messenger/Pirate bay issue. You don't really need the government to do anything, the big tech companies can do it all by themselves. What would happen if Windows 8 and the next OSX just flat out refused to let you navigate to a torrent website, or even install a torrent client? Sure , you will have an underground scene of jailbreakers and people who still run open hardware etc but they won't be getting the subsidies on buying that new family entertainment system that everyone else is getting. People are lazy and don't want to make their cultural choices themselves.
odnamra 15y ago
Wow. Simply, wow. I was literally 90% done with my Kill Hollywood RFS application when I saw Paul's tweet about this article and it stopped me dead in my tracks. Can anyone tell me that the Kill Hollywood is about making the world better and not simply about revenge? I just finished ranting like a lunatic on twitter (sorry Paul), but I'm going to try and be nice here. Keep in mind that you are attacking my very livelihood. I've been working in the film industry for my entire adult life. I recently quit my job at Paramount, a key member of the "most unscrupulous of all the industrial conglomerates" and rampant exploiter of "artists they pretend to represent." I'd like to offer my perspective as a humble filmmaker. Are there any other filmmakers here... any? I highly doubt it, the amount of ignorance I see tossed around on the subject of Kill Hollywood is simply staggering. When will I see ANY balanced perspective? One real solution? One real alternative? I can promise you that it won't happen unless Silicon Valley is willing to at least talk to a damn filmmaker about these issues. Here's my email: odnamra@gmail.com. Hell, here's my cellphone: 323-963-4433. You want to kill Hollywood, call me anytime. First, everything the RIAA and MPAA has down is WRONG. As a filmmaker whose future is on the line, I can tell you that it affects me more that it affects you. It's my livelihood, but only your inconvenience. Now, on to the article. The author makes two technical points: sharing is easy, and storage is abundant. My response is… well, duh! Here's a hint, killing Hollywood is NOT an engineering problem. All of the engineering problems have been solved, the technology already exists! We can instantly share a movie to all devices anywhere. We can store every type of media ever created. Thanks. It isn't helping. The author also offers one pseudo solution about marketplaces. I hate to tell you this, but distribution is already a marketplace! Sure it might be inefficient, sure it is mostly dominated by a few key (evil) players, but it DOES exist. Paranormal Activity was made by one solitary man. It then went through a series of marketplaces and eventually pulled in $200 million dollars. I know the guy who made the film, we met when I helped make Paranormal Activity 2 and 3 (he's a former videogame developer fyi), and I can tell you that his "blood, sweat, energy and tears" paid off pretty damn well, thank you very much! Question: Can this marketplace be improved? Answer: Yes, but… here's a snapshot of what this mythical marketplace would have to replace: Total industry size $90 billion. New movies enter the market through theaters, generate $30 billion, then proceed through windows rental>cable>VOD>DVD/Blu-ray>streaming>etc. The order can sometimes be different, what's important is that there are relative amounts of money made at each stage. A distributor might pull in $7 per ticket PER PERSON at a theater (how many friends do you take to the movies with you?), $5 per DVD/Blu-ray, and only 50 cents on streaming. [source: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-forecast-online-demand-for-movies-tv-shows-will-surpass-dvds-this-year/ http://paidcontent.org/article/419-forecast-online-demand-fo...] Can your solution replace three friends going to a movie theater and generating $21 for the distributor with three friends watching Netflix and generating 50 cents? Also consider the fact that you may see a movie in theaters, then buy it on dvd, then buy a blu-ray, and THEN watch it on Netflix over the span of several years. Also, marketing is a huge problem, the cost of marketing that movie worldwide is amortized across the entire lifecycle, and is heavily front-loaded. If you skip straight to digital streaming, for example, you skip out on huge amounts of advertising. Don't believe me? Name five indie movies that came out this year. Now name five Hollywood movies. Lastly, and this is important, what Jacques fails to realize is that the cost of making new movies REQUIRES all of these windows to exist. I personally don't want to live in a world where the only movies I can watch are kickstarted documentaries. You tell me we can crowdfund a $500 million dollar Avatar without using the hedge fund approach of a major studio, and I will change my mind. P.S. income from ALL DIGITAL is currently ~$3 billion of the $90 billion pie, why would Hollywood be in a hurry to abandon scarcity? Ignoring everything I've said, what happens when you get your wish? I can promise you that if cut out theaters so you can stream Ironman 4 (the documentary) to your retina display iPad while sipping lattes on Powell St., the whole system will come crashing down. Clearly the MPAA and the RIAA are assholes that need to be destroyed, but consider what you destroy along with it. Some of the greatest living storytellers on this planet are filmmakers. Tell me what you are offering James Cameron, creator of the 1st and 2nd highest grossing films of all time (almost $5 billion dollars worth of customer validation) in exchange for the theater, his medium of choice? I believe there are solutions, LOTS of them, but we need to work together to create them. /rant complete
A1kmm 15y ago
Hopefully once the large copyright industries start to realise that the current system will lack efficacy going forward, we can all unite for something better to replace the current intellectual property laws (note: I'm excluding trademarks here because that is a different matter). Simply getting rid of IP is not the answer - this is an opportunity to completely replace them with something better. IP law, if it worked as intended, has two consequences: * The more quality content you produce, the more revenue you derive from it. * The more content you consume, the higher your costs for it are. The former is a good thing from a macroeconomic perspective - it incentivises the creation of quality content - and very few people would disagree that it is a good thing. However, it is a bad thing to make people pay more to use more content / ideas / knowledge - from a macroeconomic perspective, if there is no marginal cost to using something, but it improves efficiency, then if more people use it, that is better for everyone. Therefore, there is a need to decouple paying people based on how much content they produce and how useful it is (the good part) from the idea that you pay more to use more content. Some kind of flat rate (perhaps as an alternative to the current system in the interim) would be one solution - everyone pays a flat fee for blanket exemption from liability under copyright and patent law, and are obliged to cite sources for their product. Content producers declare their costs, and the received flat fees are divided to content creators / knowledge discoverers based on development costs and level of usage (direct and indirect). There would be numerous complex cases and ways to exploit the system that would need to be closed and resolved through the courts, but I don't think it is fundamentally impossible, and it would both revitalise innovation and allow new types of content creation industries to be sustainable, reversing some of the vertical integration that currently occurs due to the current difficulty in making certain types of ideas profitable if you don't apply them yourself.
goggles99 15y ago
Your argument has no basis. If storage capabilities have a relative relationship to the success or failure of the entertainment industry, why is there no trend of correlation thus far? Storage media keeps improving, yet the entertainment industry's size and profits are not declining at all.

52 points by hawke 15y ago

Tyrant505 15y ago

Your formatting got screwed on a copy/paste I assume, bit difficult to read.

jacquesm 15y ago
Indeed it was, thank you for noticing that, it should be fixed now.
paulsutter 15y ago
Couldn't all of the mobile apps our friends are writing fit onto that same disk drive? With room to spare for the source code to Facebook and Google? Does that indicate that the entire intellectual property business is in its "death throes"? You could also include all the credit card numbers and ACH information for all the accounts in the world on that same drive. I guess that means its OK to use those numbers? How can so many software guys really believe that their bits are more valuable than the bits created by media companies? Or that stealing is "ok" just because it's easy if you know how? The media industry has done a shit job of making its product easy to buy or making money ad supported. They're in decline because they have done such a bad job adapting. But someone will figure it out. Entertainment will definitely evolve, but it won't go away. There's a lot more to learn reading pg's request for ideas than reading pro-piracy posts like this that seem to litter hacker news.
- jacquesm 15y ago
  The big difference is between stuff that you release and stuff that you don't. Once released bits become common knowledge and they lose a large amount of their potential value because the scarcity element is instantly gone. This is one of the driving engines behind the the whole software-as-a-service game, it gets rid of the problem of piracy and it turns the product into a subscription rather than a one-time sale. No second hand version of google docs will ever be sold.
  - paulsutter 15y ago
    Paid mobile apps are widely released, and people I know make a living selling them. Is anyone who buys a mobile app a chump? And what about the ACH information? If you came across that sort of data you would feel free to use it to transfer a few million bucks to your own account? It would be just as easy as copying a movie. So if the data is out there, you are arguing that it's OK to do that?
    - jacquesm 15y ago
      > Paid mobile apps are widely released, and people I know make a living selling them. Is anyone who buys a mobile app a chump? You used google and facebook as an example, they are clearly not releasing binaries but are in the service industry. Mobile applications (which I think are a transient phenomenon that will evaporate when mobile web applications will be more viable, the same happened with desktop software, with some notable exceptions) are already pirated wholesale (see http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20107572-94/how-piracy-ruins-it-for-paid-apps-inside-apps/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20107572-94/how-piracy-ruin...) that doesn't make the writers of mobile software 'chumps', but it does mean that they will have to factor this in or they will likely be hurt. > It would be just as easy as copying a movie, and the data is out there, so you are arguing that it's OK to do that? No, obviously I'm not arguing that it is ok to do that.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
- ajscherer 15y ago
  Software is not analogous because it has been developed from the very start with the knowledge that the bits would be easily copy-able, and has been designed accordingly. I remember being asked to type in phrases from a game instruction manual at least a decade before anyone was consuming commercial audio or video on their PC. Furthermore, software is an interactive medium, which makes copy protection easier, and copying riskier. It isn't clear to me how you could make copy protection inherently part of music (without ruining it). Even if you fully controlled all the hardware and software used for playback, you wouldn't control the link between the speaker and my ears. As to ACH information, it depends on what you mean by "use those numbers," since they have no inherent value. If you mean reading them for fun, I would be OK with that. If you mean using them to drain money from people's bank accounts, that would not be okay, but it also wouldn't be copying (since the original would be destroyed). If you knew of a way to copy money from one account to another, I would be completely fine with you copying my checking account in full. I know you would probably prefer that people think about stealing and unauthorized copying as the same thing, but there is a difference and it's important. One is completely physically undetectable to the victim, and the other isn't. How can you tell the difference between your CD selling poorly because people are pirating it, and it selling poorly because it sucks? Without widespread snooping on other peoples' electronic communications, you can't. If someone drained your bank account it would be trivial to detect.
  - paulsutter 15y ago
    I agree that draconian laws or snooping measures are not reasonable mechanisms to enforce copyright. But the analogy to mobile is interesting. Mobile app revenues are absolutely booming, and mobile apps dont require inconvenient or invasive protection schemes. Mobile apps are easier to buy than pirate, and they are reasonably priced. It's bizarre to me that most of the good content isn't available for streaming, when I'd be perfectly happy to pay per view. I dont have any media in my home. It's all streamed. My friends who pirate all deal with torrents and file conversions and moving files around. And honestly I dont have time for that. It's far cheaper just to pay for it. Or not watch it at all, because most of the good content isn't available for streaming. Which is the real problem.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  "the bits created by media companies" They don't. Media companies don't write songs, neither they're really shoot movies. They are the middlemen. Yes, I think that my bits are more valuable than the vapor created by middlemen. But there's more important issue: Once I have 100000 books, 1000000 songs and 10000 movies on my hard drives, I might lose desire to have any of their bits at all. I don't even need them produced because the bits already there are just as fine.
  - paulsutter 15y ago
    There are a lot of super smart guys working day and night to create movies, and they're solving a lot of hard technical challenges and applying many decades of experience in what makes a production entertaining. While I dont watch a lot of TV or see a lot of movies, I certainly respect the impressive work that goes into them.

crusso 15y ago

The business model will definitely evolve with all the digitization and internet pressures. Claiming that the industry is exhibiting "death throes" is way way way premature, though. The way I look at it, government power and spending are on the rise. Meanwhile, big media continues to be very important to politics, both as a source of money and as a source of star power for re-elections. Those two forces working together will be extraordinarily difficult to kill. Like a many-headed hydra, we'll whack off a head or two, but the darned thing will keep fighting for its existence.

nyellin 15y ago

I'm not convinced this is a global issue. Here in Israel, many local TV shows are freely available on the internet, including the ever-popular Eretz Nehederet. Plenty of Israelis pirate content, but the local media industry seems to be doing fine. I can't recall any attempts to crack down on pirates, let alone attempts to pass draconian anti-piracy legislation. This is all anecdotal. If someone knows where to find the data supporting or contradicting this, please post.

vectorpush 15y ago
I'm not convinced this is a global issue. I wouldn't be so sure. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-17355203 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-1735520...
- nyellin 15y ago
  Yes, the death throes of the American media industry are a global problem. However, evidence is needed to prove that the global media industry is dying.
  - vectorpush 15y ago
    Ah, I see what you mean. In that case it's not even an American problem since Hollywood is doing quite well. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-again-fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...

PaulHoule 15y ago

This is big talk, but in the meantime I went to the gym the other day and checked out the movies for sale and bought a Blu-Ray of the Truman Show for $7.99. I went home and played it, there were no annoying trailers or anything. Me, my son, and the reporter who's always writing about our coven in the newspaper all watched it and had a great time. Hollywood offers consumers many chump choices (like bloated cable packages) but it also offers good value too. Hollywood leads the world in producing compelling content and it's always been smart about turning it into money -- I'm sure things are going to change in the next 20 years, but odds are good that some fraction of Hollywood is going to stay on top.

paulsutter 15y ago
I think jaquesm's point below about mobile apps is (accidentally) a great point. People are happy to pay for media when it's easy to do so. Mobile apps are pirated only rarely because it's so easy to buy them. That's why they're growing like crazy. Hollywood's mistake has been to make it so difficult to buy media. So few movies and shows are available for streaming, for example. There's a great opportunity in helping shape the future of entertainment.
odnamra 15y ago
I love this. You are correct on all accounts. In theory, creating a movie is about telling a story with the best possible content and the best possible experience. You might laugh at the thought, but I can promise you that all filmmakers toil under that aspiration. Actors, hair, makeup, wardrobe, location, sfx, vfx, audio, music... ALL handcrafted and laboriously created in pursuit of telling the story as best you can. Theaters, Blu-ray, Dolby, HD, 3D, all developed in the hopes of creating the best possible experience for that content. I'm not saying there isn't a lot of crap (lord knows I've personally worked on many terrible movies), but I'm speaking of ideals here. Shall we Kill Hollywood and replace everything with cat videos on Youtube? That's too easy. I can offer many suggestions on how to vindictively kill Hollywood right now, but that would be a disservice to people like you who just want to enjoy watching a movie. And it's because Hollywood contains this fantastic talent base, and enormous back catalog, that they will be around for a long time to come.

benologist 15y ago

You're envisioning a future where you replace the middlemen you don't like with a set of ones you do like, that aren't up to the job anyway. Marketplaces have existed for years in various forms - iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, TPB, MegaUpload etc ... their users are almost exclusively interested in Big Content stuff. Mininova highlights this - they went legit and right now 135 people are downloading their most popular video, 70 times fewer than the number of people currently downloading the 4th Mission Impossible rip which is pretty much the very definition of Big Content easy, safe fluff. Mininova was one of the most popular websites in the world before they went legitimate - this isn't people not knowing, this is people not caring. Kickstarter-ish models for production is just surreal - it is the complete opposite of on demand and that's a critical component for the future. The overall premise that the RIAA/MPAA are or have to die at all is pretty sketchy - the problem is they're predatory and not keeping up with technology and consumers, not that they're redundant.

jacquesm 15y ago
> Kickstarter-ish models for production is just surreal - it is the complete opposite of on demand and that's a critical component for the future. Tell that to these guys: http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/the-kickstarter-film-festival http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/the-kickstarter-film-festiva... I'd happily pay for Pat Metheny to produce his next album before I can get my hands on it with a mechanism in place that would revert the money if he never released it, and even without that mechanism I'd take the risk.
- benologist 15y ago
  Yeah it works when it's novel, now imagine that it's normal ... instead of going to Netflix and streaming a movie tonight you go to kickstarter-for-movies.com and book what you're hopefully going to watch for Christmas. I cannot imagine a worse way to be entertained, it actually returns us to the pre-internet days with the added plus of gambling on and paying in advance for everything we want.
  - rosser 15y ago

cstross 15y ago

An industry is dying ... That industry is the media industry That's a spectacularly vague assertion. Let me give you a more pointed one: there is no such thing as the media industry. In [textual] publishing alone there are at least a dozen different highly specialized industries that, aside from a common technology base (the printing press) are radically different in structure and operation. And that's within any one language/nation; if you look at, say, mass-audience consumer movies, is it reasonable to stretch and assertion that "the movies are dying" to cover both Hollywood and Bollywood, much less crowdsourced low budget SF epics from Finland and state-subsidized art films from France? (I'll agree that the MPAA and RIAA are parasitic and preside over a business model that doesn't appear to be long-term viable without lobbying for government support -- but that's not the same thing at all, and I really wish pundits like Mattheij would be a bit more circumspect in their predictions.)

jacquesm 15y ago
You're right! That's why you're the writer and I'm the (very much part time) blogger I guess. I'll try to be more precise in the future, the media industry is indeed a much too broad brush. This bit started out as an email I wrote to myself a while ago and then posted in response to another thread on HN, I should have done a better job of sharpening it before posting it.
- cstross 15y ago
  Oh, right. My gut feeling, FWIW, is that the internet is a communications medium that tends to disintermediate supply chains; because it makes it really easy for people to locate sources of supply, a lot of traditional middlemen suddenly discover that nobody needs them. But that doesn't mean there won't be any middlemen; merely that the buggy-whip vendors will be replaced by the folks who understand how to sell automobile seat covers (if you'll permit me to stretch the metaphor).
jmillikin 15y ago
The term "media industry" is not usually applied to "crowdsourced low budget SF epics from Finland and state-subsidized art films from France", any more than the term "agricultural industry" would be applied to someone's backyard herb garden. The OP did not claim that "movies are dying", he claimed that the media industry is dying, which is a completely different statement. If the media industry dies, people will still make movies, they just won't have the massive budgets that contemporary movies have. For what it's worth, I think the OP is letting his anticipation cloud his better judgment. While the media industry will certainly decrease in size and influence, and will probably become more selective about which scripts it funds, it will continue to exist so long as customers are willing to pay $20 for the experience of watching a blockbuster on a hundred-food cinema screen.

VMG 15y ago

It'd be nice to have some data to prove the assumption that the industry is dying. Not that I can't believe it but I think one should back up these kinds of claims.

guard-of-terra 15y ago

The idea of a digital stockpile of the world culture in your closet is very interesting. I already have a torrent of 100 thousand books on my mirror raid, for example, so I'm sure I won't be missing much even if they go nuclear on internet piracy. In a few years you'd be able to do the same with music and movies.

michaelpinto 15y ago

I do a great deal of work with youth marketing so I have a slightly different perspective. I can't speak to music -- but films cost a great deal of money to make, and YouTube videos just won't replace that. If you look at the next generation of consumers (kids) they're watching more broadcast television than any other demographic, they're camping out overnight to see films like the Hunger Games and this may surprise you ancient twentysomethings but these kids are actually paying for their music too. This is why Katy and Gaga are making real money, but more sophisticated music aimed at young adults isn't doing well. The biggest mistake that techies make is that they assume that their lives are the lives that everyone else leads: And this just isn't the case. Are kids spending tons of time looking at YouTube? Yes! But they're also spending hours looking at the Disney channel too and paying for songs on iTunes with that gift card that grandma got them for their birthday. Will the film and music companies go through a great deal of disruption? Very much so — but they won't be replaced by tech companies, unless those are videogame companies. The only way that tech companies will disrupt Hollywood is if they get into producing content - so far the only examples of this is Steve Jobs taking over Pixar to make films and Sony with their valuable music and film business.

ippisl 15y ago
Why are they paying if they can get illegal copies ? and why watch broadcast tv when they can get on-demand content ?
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  Because they often don't have personal computers anymore, not as we had them. When I was a kid, I set up zsnes on the computer at my after-school program, downloaded a bunch of ROMs, and taught the kids the key-mappings. I became the Guy Who Made Video Games Run on the PC. I did it at home, rampant pirate that I was. But do today's kids actually have an unlocked PC available to them? Do they have consoles whose games come in self-contained cartridges so that piracy becomes imaginable? I don't think so. They have consoles and handhelds that work mostly via their connections to proprietary company servers. They have iPods and phones and tablets locked down with company DRM. They have Windows 7 or OS X computers at home, at school, at after-school, and in offices with actual security models that stop kids from messing around installing whatever they like. Pirating a game now involves torrenting several GBs of ISO, mod-chipping your console or installing a game crack, and then installing a crack/workaround for the network log-in based DRM (thanks, EA and Ubisoft). It's often easier just to buy the damn thing off Steam, but then you have to ask Mom and Dad for money to buy games. What kid wants to go through that ordeal? We grew up in a Wild West playground of open personal computing where little was locked, locks could be picked, and there weren't any security guards. I fear today's kids have grown up in a walled garden guarded by men with flaming swords.

deleted 15y ago

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prodigal_erik 15y ago
It's an archaic word, not related to throwing anything: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/throe http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/throe
- deleted 15y ago
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epscylonb 15y ago

The smart people in the music industry know that to remain relevant they need to stay close to the artists. This once lopsided relationship is changing to be more equal, the record companies need the artists to make money. There is value in curation, marketing and management. I expect some of the current media companies will surive but they will look different and be much more competitive.

davidw 15y ago

> Maybe that will mean that there will be no more media superstars. Why would that be? The superstars are the ones most likely to survive in some sense. You need to 'think at the margin': http://journal.dedasys.com/2012/01/21/thinking-at-the-margin http://journal.dedasys.com/2012/01/21/thinking-at-the-margin - it's the little guys on the edge of doing their art full time or not that are the ones most likely to be buffeted around by the winds of change. The Rolling Stones will still make lots of cash somehow. Also, the ransom model has been with us for a while - it was proposed as a way to fund open source software too. So far, it hasn't worked that well (a few anecdotes notwithstanding). It can, in some cases, but most consumers want to have a look at something, evaluate it, and then get their instant gratification, not wait another N months for it to actually be produced.

DanielRibeiro 15y ago

Steven Blank made a much more in depth analysis of this phenomenon on his: Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA[1] In a nutshell, it shows how much the movie industry always fought change, it always lost, and it always made more money out it. [1] http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant-innovate-and-the-result-is-sopa/ http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant...

tsotha 15y ago

I'm not convinced that just because you'll soon be able to fit the world's entire electronic cultural output into your pocket the media companies will necessarily be out of business. They're pushing for controls on the way the rest of us consume content, and they may well be successful in the end. They don't have to be 100% successful, just successful enough to make money.

api 15y ago

I think there's a larger picture here. It's time to declare war on middlemen, period. There are producers and customers. There is no place for anything else in the 21st century. Here's a startup formula for you all: 1) Identify a place where a middleman is taking a cut or gate-keeping an industry. 2) Design a system, technology, or service that either eliminates the middleman entirely or replaces it with something far more efficient and much lower margin. 3) Profit.

DLWormwood 15y ago
> It's time to declare war on middlemen, period. Got a "B Ark" handy?
- jacquesm 15y ago
  Be careful, you might end up dying from an infection contracted through an un-sanitized telephone.
- J3L2404 15y ago
  Golgafrincham is a red semi-desert planet that is home of the Great Circling Poets of Arium and a species of particularly inspiring lichen. Its people decided it was time to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population, and so the descendants of the Circling Poets concocted a story that their planet would shortly be destroyed in a great catastrophe. (It was apparently under threat from a "mutant star goat"). The useless third of the population (consisting of hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitisers and the like) were packed into the B-Ark, one of three purported giant Ark spaceships, and told that everyone else would follow shortly in the other two. The other two thirds of the population, of course, did not follow and "led full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone". The B-Ark was programmed to crash-land on a suitably remote planet on one of the outer spiral arms of the galaxy, which happened to be Earth, and the Golgafrinchan rejects gradually mingled with and usurped the native cavemen*, becoming the ancestors of humanity and thereby altering and distorting the course of the great experiment to find the question for the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, or so Ford Prefect presumes. A lot of them didn't make it through the winter three years prior to Arthur Dent's reunion with Ford Prefect, and the few who remained in the spring said they needed a holiday and set out on a raft. History says they must have survived. People from Golgafrincham are called Golgafrinchans. In some versions of the novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the planet is also referred to as "Golgafrinchan", but this usage is less common and is thought to be an error of typography.

shalakhin 15y ago

It looks like media industry has to reborn and form a new way to do business and get their income. On the other hand I like indie musicians more as they try to innovate or make music for people more than just get their money and aren't connected to labels. An interesting group – Singleton is an example.

mattchew 15y ago

I'm glad he mentioned Kickstarter. I'm really excited about the potential there. I think Kickstarter (or something like it) will be at least as important as eBay or Craigslist. I just wish we had it back when Firefly was dying.

jiggy2011 15y ago

You know, I've heard this Hollywood/The RIAA is dead meme repeated for at least 10 years now and I just don't see it happening anytime soon. Is there even any evidence that they are dying? Are their revenues falling year upon year, piracy advocates insist that they aren't. I still see trailers every year for the latest $BIG_MEDIA_MOVIE with no sign of slowing down, how many movies you can fit on a 4TB drive is pretty irrelevant. Since the original iPod came out people have been able to store more music than they actually listen to anyway. Anyway, what would replace it? Youtube? Half of their content is either scenes from TV/Movies or people talking about TV/Movies. Kickstarter? Yes for folks who are passionate enough to think about what they want and go out actively looking for stuff they might like. Many people just want to see a trailer for latest big blockbuster so that they know what to buy for their kids when they want some peace and quiet or what to talk about at the watercooler on monday. What about piracy? Everyone seems to be firmly of the opinion that the cat can not be put back in the back with this one. Me, I'm not so sure. The feds are going after pirate websites with the big guns. Not to mention that on the whole the people who make your software and hardware are on the side of the content producers. Since we are all going "Post PC" and many computers will become more like appliances, what's to say that your future Apple TV will even play any content that has not been directly licensed from iTunes and the like? Look at the MSN Messenger/Pirate bay issue. You don't really need the government to do anything, the big tech companies can do it all by themselves. What would happen if Windows 8 and the next OSX just flat out refused to let you navigate to a torrent website, or even install a torrent client? Sure , you will have an underground scene of jailbreakers and people who still run open hardware etc but they won't be getting the subsidies on buying that new family entertainment system that everyone else is getting. People are lazy and don't want to make their cultural choices themselves.

odnamra 15y ago

Wow. Simply, wow. I was literally 90% done with my Kill Hollywood RFS application when I saw Paul's tweet about this article and it stopped me dead in my tracks. Can anyone tell me that the Kill Hollywood is about making the world better and not simply about revenge? I just finished ranting like a lunatic on twitter (sorry Paul), but I'm going to try and be nice here. Keep in mind that you are attacking my very livelihood. I've been working in the film industry for my entire adult life. I recently quit my job at Paramount, a key member of the "most unscrupulous of all the industrial conglomerates" and rampant exploiter of "artists they pretend to represent." I'd like to offer my perspective as a humble filmmaker. Are there any other filmmakers here... any? I highly doubt it, the amount of ignorance I see tossed around on the subject of Kill Hollywood is simply staggering. When will I see ANY balanced perspective? One real solution? One real alternative? I can promise you that it won't happen unless Silicon Valley is willing to at least talk to a damn filmmaker about these issues. Here's my email: odnamra@gmail.com. Hell, here's my cellphone: 323-963-4433. You want to kill Hollywood, call me anytime. First, everything the RIAA and MPAA has down is WRONG. As a filmmaker whose future is on the line, I can tell you that it affects me more that it affects you. It's my livelihood, but only your inconvenience. Now, on to the article. The author makes two technical points: sharing is easy, and storage is abundant. My response is… well, duh! Here's a hint, killing Hollywood is NOT an engineering problem. All of the engineering problems have been solved, the technology already exists! We can instantly share a movie to all devices anywhere. We can store every type of media ever created. Thanks. It isn't helping. The author also offers one pseudo solution about marketplaces. I hate to tell you this, but distribution is already a marketplace! Sure it might be inefficient, sure it is mostly dominated by a few key (evil) players, but it DOES exist. Paranormal Activity was made by one solitary man. It then went through a series of marketplaces and eventually pulled in $200 million dollars. I know the guy who made the film, we met when I helped make Paranormal Activity 2 and 3 (he's a former videogame developer fyi), and I can tell you that his "blood, sweat, energy and tears" paid off pretty damn well, thank you very much! Question: Can this marketplace be improved? Answer: Yes, but… here's a snapshot of what this mythical marketplace would have to replace: Total industry size $90 billion. New movies enter the market through theaters, generate $30 billion, then proceed through windows rental>cable>VOD>DVD/Blu-ray>streaming>etc. The order can sometimes be different, what's important is that there are relative amounts of money made at each stage. A distributor might pull in $7 per ticket PER PERSON at a theater (how many friends do you take to the movies with you?), $5 per DVD/Blu-ray, and only 50 cents on streaming. [source: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-forecast-online-demand-for-movies-tv-shows-will-surpass-dvds-this-year/ http://paidcontent.org/article/419-forecast-online-demand-fo...] Can your solution replace three friends going to a movie theater and generating $21 for the distributor with three friends watching Netflix and generating 50 cents? Also consider the fact that you may see a movie in theaters, then buy it on dvd, then buy a blu-ray, and THEN watch it on Netflix over the span of several years. Also, marketing is a huge problem, the cost of marketing that movie worldwide is amortized across the entire lifecycle, and is heavily front-loaded. If you skip straight to digital streaming, for example, you skip out on huge amounts of advertising. Don't believe me? Name five indie movies that came out this year. Now name five Hollywood movies. Lastly, and this is important, what Jacques fails to realize is that the cost of making new movies REQUIRES all of these windows to exist. I personally don't want to live in a world where the only movies I can watch are kickstarted documentaries. You tell me we can crowdfund a $500 million dollar Avatar without using the hedge fund approach of a major studio, and I will change my mind. P.S. income from ALL DIGITAL is currently ~$3 billion of the $90 billion pie, why would Hollywood be in a hurry to abandon scarcity? Ignoring everything I've said, what happens when you get your wish? I can promise you that if cut out theaters so you can stream Ironman 4 (the documentary) to your retina display iPad while sipping lattes on Powell St., the whole system will come crashing down. Clearly the MPAA and the RIAA are assholes that need to be destroyed, but consider what you destroy along with it. Some of the greatest living storytellers on this planet are filmmakers. Tell me what you are offering James Cameron, creator of the 1st and 2nd highest grossing films of all time (almost $5 billion dollars worth of customer validation) in exchange for the theater, his medium of choice? I believe there are solutions, LOTS of them, but we need to work together to create them. /rant complete

A1kmm 15y ago

Hopefully once the large copyright industries start to realise that the current system will lack efficacy going forward, we can all unite for something better to replace the current intellectual property laws (note: I'm excluding trademarks here because that is a different matter). Simply getting rid of IP is not the answer - this is an opportunity to completely replace them with something better. IP law, if it worked as intended, has two consequences: * The more quality content you produce, the more revenue you derive from it. * The more content you consume, the higher your costs for it are. The former is a good thing from a macroeconomic perspective - it incentivises the creation of quality content - and very few people would disagree that it is a good thing. However, it is a bad thing to make people pay more to use more content / ideas / knowledge - from a macroeconomic perspective, if there is no marginal cost to using something, but it improves efficiency, then if more people use it, that is better for everyone. Therefore, there is a need to decouple paying people based on how much content they produce and how useful it is (the good part) from the idea that you pay more to use more content. Some kind of flat rate (perhaps as an alternative to the current system in the interim) would be one solution - everyone pays a flat fee for blanket exemption from liability under copyright and patent law, and are obliged to cite sources for their product. Content producers declare their costs, and the received flat fees are divided to content creators / knowledge discoverers based on development costs and level of usage (direct and indirect). There would be numerous complex cases and ways to exploit the system that would need to be closed and resolved through the courts, but I don't think it is fundamentally impossible, and it would both revitalise innovation and allow new types of content creation industries to be sustainable, reversing some of the vertical integration that currently occurs due to the current difficulty in making certain types of ideas profitable if you don't apply them yourself.

goggles99 15y ago

Your argument has no basis. If storage capabilities have a relative relationship to the success or failure of the entertainment industry, why is there no trend of correlation thus far? Storage media keeps improving, yet the entertainment industry's size and profits are not declining at all.