Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 697 posts

Re: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

#121

Post by InclinedPlane »

socratic wrote: post #27

I agree that Hollywood is evil, however, is the argument that it has peaked really accurate? ("Hollywood is dying.") This RFS doesn't really give any statistics (perhaps because it will be up for longer than those statistics will be current). That said, based on a few minutes of Google searching, the average American apparently watches 150 hours of TV per month, and every few years there is a new "biggest grossing fi…

Adjusted for inflation, the top 5 highest grossing films in history were made in 1956, 1982, 1965, 1977, and 1939. Super blockbusters like Avatar are not new phenomena, they're merely par for the course.

Meanwhile, people are spending more time using computers or playing games, and that necessarily takes away from time and money spent watching tv or movies. More so, Hollywood no longer has a lock on the video entertainment people watch. More people have watched "charlie bit my finger" on youtube than have watched any show on broadcast tv currently. But more than that there are new, highly popular forms of video entertainment being produced which have very little to do with Hollywood. And many of these people are already making a living off of these works.

Imagine what will happen in the coming years when video production and hosting is even more ubiquitous and cheap and more people can opt to self-produce and self-distribute and take the lion's share of the revenues (from ads, direct sales, merch, live events, etc.)

Sooner than we realize the old power structures will fall away as more and more artists decide to keep control and profit for their works in their own hands.

Re: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

#122

Post by krshmda »

iamdann wrote: post #29

Free idea: Create an app that provides a TiVo-like experience to all web video. You could "record" channels from YouTube the same way you'd queue TED, or even Hulu+, Netflix, et all. Your app would automatically pull new streaming episodes for you to watch and manage the same way people use DVRs on televisions. If internet TV, and "television app" really are the next thing...if you build an amazing version of this no…

I've been doing this instead of satellite TV. $8/month for HD comedy, news and educational stuff (H+, CNN, YT). I think downloading will dominate the future more than streaming. It's just a better experience, you can skip forward ads and you can download off peak hours.

Of course, capturing the RTMP data violates the user agreements but it should be fair to store the incoming data to play it back later.

Re: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

#123

Post by marquis »

ThomPete wrote: post #108
marquis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree in part, the issue is that good art, really really good art, is a full-time job that can take years and years of practice. Much like writing good software. Saying art should be free is saying all software should be free - the same amount of work and risk goes into it. There is a balance to be had here and in many countries it is solved with artist grants, recognizing the value to be had from a rich cult…

I think you are confusing craftmanship with art here. It's the craftmanship that takes years. Art can take anything from 10 seconds to 10 years.

Art is not putting 2 objects together. It's a conscious effort to understand and express the world around you. While Mozart's 6 year old compositions may have been entertaining, it was 20 years of musical development that allowed him to write his late piano sonatas (which may have taken him only 20 minutes to compose). That is not just craftmanship: composers who do not 'make it' often become the craftsmen by working as transposers and editors.

Re: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

#124

Post by [deleted] »

ThomPete wrote: post #108
marquis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree in part, the issue is that good art, really really good art, is a full-time job that can take years and years of practice. Much like writing good software. Saying art should be free is saying all software should be free - the same amount of work and risk goes into it. There is a balance to be had here and in many countries it is solved with artist grants, recognizing the value to be had from a rich cult…

I think you are confusing craftmanship with art here. It's the craftmanship that takes years. Art can take anything from 10 seconds to 10 years.

[deleted]

Re: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

#125

Post by zerostar07 »

spodek wrote: post #110
malkia wrote: post #35

Here is what Francis Ford Coppola has to say on the matter: http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-O... "We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or…

HN is techy and entrepreneurial so most of the ideas presented so far suggest new technologies and business models. Does this community know of the French New Wave -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_new_wave ? It influenced Hollywood as much as any new technology and business model since WWII. IT created a new ways of looking at movies, created the role of director as author, decreased studios' power, and put cre…

The role of technology is not to dictate creative ideas to artists, rather it has to be a vehicle through which artists create. BTW i don't think cinema as a whole is in a crisis, au contraire there are always beautiful stories told in movies everywhere, china, europe, indie US movies, and cinema is not gonna die when hollywood dies. So yes, entrepreneurs will suggest and create new technologies, try new things without feeling much guilt about not being idealistic.

Re: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

#126

Post by untog »

ypcx wrote: post #61

Make a Github for movies. If I don't like a part of your movie, I can fork it and make it better. People collaborate, and the system tracks their share in the project, and when the movie makes it to the cinema, TV, Netflix, etc., they are remunerated accordingly. Initially, a resistance is to be expected in the established distribution channels, therefore a new distribution channel is to be built. Perhaps a P2P on pa…

I really don't see how that would work. Do the actors get phone calls every day? "User1232 has proposed a rewrite of scene 22. We need you back in to see how it comes out on film. Oh, User3423 will be directing it".

While there's plenty of space for innovation, I'd be deeply wary of applying too many programming models to artistic endeavors. A lot succeed precisely because they are the work of one single person with a vision. As a director I might be horrified if some hack could take my work of art, play fart noises over it, and make money from it.

Re: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

#127

Post by MatthewB »

PG - When you say kill Hollywood, who are you talking about exactly? I assume you mean the middlemen of Hollywood - people who add zero value to the entertainment industry. If so, I completely agree.

Startups need to offer content creators a better/cheaper/easier way to distribute their content. Distribution is where startups can really succeed. When I say distribution, what I mean is the method by which people consume content. The problem is the middlemen control the true content creators.

The biggest problem is quality. Youtube is a dead simple way to distribute content but the problem is you'll never see anything on Youtube that rivals the quality of something on NBC, HBO, CBS etc. I believe Netflix has the right idea by funding their own high-quality content to distribute on their own "network." However, Netflix may just end up becoming another NBC, HBO, Warner Bros. over time.

As I mentioned before, the best was to achieve the goal of killing the middleman is by providing high-quality content creators a way to get funding and distribute their work to large audiences without giving up the rights to their work. Additionally, there are plenty of ways to increase margin by using technology to get viewers more involved with the content. We've only just begun to scratch the surface of interactive entertainment.

I've been thinking about this stuff for a while and it's a difficult, complex issue. I'd love to chat with anyone who has thoughts about this, feel free to email me or respond here (email in profile).

Re: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

#128

Post by potatolicious »

skb_ wrote: post #58
pg wrote: post #9

Incidentally, Paul Buchheit deserves all the credit for this idea. The YC partners were having lunch yesterday and he suggested posting this RFS. Whereupon we all turned to Jessica, who is usually the one who talks us out of doing crazy things. I was kind of surprised she didn't try to talk us out of it.

Did you guys consider video games? I think that's already a viable alternative form of entertainment. I would argue video games already killed Hollywood, they just never pulled the sword out. $50 for 100+ hours of content vs $10 for roughly 2 hours? No contest.

I don't think video games are a full substitute for TV or movies. They are completely different experiences - one is purely passive, and the other is active and participatory.

There are lots of game fans that would claim that this distinction is what makes games superior, but for a lot of people I think that's what turns them off. The passivity is a virtue in many places.

Re: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

#129

Post by ig1 »

It interesting to see how narrow the responses are here, what may be the standard entertainment in 20 years time might be something that unlike anything mainstream today.

It could be something completely new or something that's incredibly niche right now (for example machines which induce lucid dreaming - what happens when they become reliable and cheap?).

Re: Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

#130

Post by aethr »

marquis wrote: post #90
malkia wrote: post #35

Here is what Francis Ford Coppola has to say on the matter: http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-O... "We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or…

While I agree in part, the issue is that good art, really really good art, is a full-time job that can take years and years of practice. Much like writing good software. Saying art should be free is saying all software should be free - the same amount of work and risk goes into it. There is a balance to be had here and in many countries it is solved with artist grants, recognizing the value to be had from a rich cult…

Passionate artists will still pursue art for the joy of creating and sharing their art with others. This is how it has always been.

Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of the popular artists from the last 20 years began their entertainment careers to get "rich and famous". These people didn't do it for the love of the art, and looking at the decline in quality of the music industry since the 70s I think we can all see how that worked out.

With any luck, taking the "rockstar" incentive out of the music industry means we get less music being made, but of an overall higher quality. You know, because the people who still pursue it are actually artists.

Post reply on HN