Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

I very much disagree that what Hollywood thinks is killing them now, is not killing them.

It is!

There are two parts to Hollywood:

1. Being the distributor.

2. Being a source of funding.

That's it!

The internet has been disintermediating (fancy economic term for killing middle-men) industries since it began.

Piracy often offers not just a lower price but a far better product. How many stories do we all know of people willing to pay who can't because of how shitty the distribution of Hollywood is? People frustrated by all their legal options to the point of seeking out pirated content despite their ability and willingness to pay. I am one of those people!

Better distribution is one half of killing Hollywood.

The other part is financing. Big Hollywood studios are in the well known business of managing high risk investments. You spend a lot of money on developing movies, shows, etc, on most you lose money, on some you make a bit, on a few you make all the profit you need to keep going.

Who has the same business model? VCs! Also video game publishers.

So all you need to kill Hollywood is a tone of cash to fund talent, attract better talent by giving them a better deal and then distribute it better.

But here is the catch, a company like that would exist with much lower profit margins than a traditional Hollywood company. It has to! Because that's what killing the middle man is. You take his share of the profit and drop it. Prices of the end product drop, end consumers have more money, the middle man is out of luck.

And that is why you can't hasten the end of Hollywood. It's going to be ugly and painful and they know it. That's why they are lobbying like they are going out of business, because they are.

The only thing you can do is limit the damage. We should aim for an equal and opposing lobbying arm. If we libertarian minded, super individualistic, detail obsessed, disagreement loving, intellectual bunch of geeks can make that happen, I highly doubt. But I don't see any other way out.

Serfs barely made enough to get them through the winter, any aspirations aside from surviving and enjoying what time they could with their families were simply fantasies. The parallel you're trying to draw between the Big Wigs/Lords and Serfs/Everyone else in Hollywood, doesn't work.

This is absolutely wrong.

Feudalism died because people joined debate societies, talked about enlightenment ideas, fought hard and took over the government to fight the oppressive nature of the monarchy and the Catholic Church. Honorable people started this endeavor and then radicals took it over. But the French Revolution wasn't an easy or pretty process.

You don't have to centrally plan the creative destruction of Hollywood. This is like arguing we can't cut overseas military spending because think of the jobs we will lose.

What would you replace slavery with? What about internal combustion engines? Replacing these things aren't easy, more people will suffer in the short-term. But guess what? People are suffering now, and society as a whole rots because we squander the opportunity to use TV and film to enliven people's minds, instead we just want to empty their pocketbooks by any means possible.

I worked as an executive in Hollywood. The culture and cartel-like nature encourages people to be mean and unethical. It's not about creating art or entertaining people, it's about controlling a market and creating profit regardless of who you destroy.

You are confused by nice people and their charm. Show me a list of GOOD people in Hollywood. Do you even know the history or mechanics of film finance?

Do you think the euphemism "Hollywood accounting" is justified? The entire system is a scam and deserves to be creatively destroyed. And they do need to be destroyed, especially after threatening to cut off funding for Obama just because the White House won't blindly support the predatory and foolish laws the industry puts out.

It's over. The industry's model is dying.

I am affiliated with Setkick,

and yeah - Setkick is aiming to digitise the project management of film & tv productions.

Managing a large scale film or tv show still relies on some quite archaic practises (and zillions of dead trees) - so again this is something that needs to be disrupted.

I'm gonna revive the TwitchTV thread with a true story. I've killed the cable and gone with higher-speed broadband, ordered but not yet installed. I was tired here on Saturday night and went looking for some NBA, and not reading the links closely wound up watching NBA 2k12 on twitch for a few minutes until I snapped it wasn't actually live NBA. That tells me the animation is close to passing for photorealistic, and even that might not be important if the players (the humans [or AIs] playing, I mean) are so good that it is as interesting to watch as it when watching live giant humans really play basketball.

Second true story was chaperoning a 15-year-old overnight birthday party right after Skyrim came out. Watching seemed to be quite acceptable entertainment, although there were occasional switches to the Fallout channel. This despite enough controllers for actually multi-play.

As has been noted, this is still somewhat Hollywood-y in the movie-sized investment in those games, but the revenue is definitely not going to traditional motion picture studios.