YCombinators places a bounty on Hollywood’s head

January 21, 2012

Whooo, this was a brave article to write, without much politeness nor political correctness. A brilliant PR stunt by YCombinator to get more mind share from geeks and increase the deal-flow.

Personally I don’t think Hollywood is dying. Hollywood is just greedy. They want to extract money from big tech companies and raise barriers to entry (and barriers to disrupt). Both are rational from business perspective. Unfortunately they are trying to achieve that by buying legislation. That failed for now, but the fight is not over – greed is timeless.

There are a lot of people in the world and they are still starving for entertainment. And Hollywood’s brand of entertainment doesn’t seem to be in a big decline. If a whole other (gray and black hat) industry has erupted to take care of distribution and make the product more available then I don’t think the issue is in the product. The issue is in the distribution. And as long as Hollywood has a desirable product (not just movies, but also producing fame, role-models and ‘culture’) it isn’t going to die or be killed.

I however have to agree strongly on one point YC post makes: “It would be great if what people did instead of watching shows was exercise more and spend more time with their friends and families.”. I’ve been living without owning radio or TV for more than a year now and the effects are amazing – much more time for relationships, sports and especially books. However sometimes I do miss fresh cultural references in conversations.

Image via Wikipedia

Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and

via: ycombinator.com