Posts tagged Internet
The Ego Nickel
The landscape of the entertainment business and deal making culture
DC Pierson schools a lazy student.
(Source: dcpierson)
And since this new generation was born into post-modern anything, they are wilder and more fearless than anything you’ve ever dealt with. But remind yourselves: Youth isn’t king. Content is king. Lena Dunham’s 26-year-old voice is just as vital as Louis CK’s 42-year-old voice which is just as vital as Eddie Pepitone’s 50-something voice.
Age doesn’t matter anymore. It’s all about what you have to say and what you’re going to say. Please throw the old fucking model away.
Patton Oswalt on our future. (via caseydonahue)
Huzzah!
(via stevewoolf)
So, when these companies start to look for public market exits, there’s a good chance the “private market will lose money.
Mary Meeker
Facebook’s SecondMarket muppets | Felix Salmon
(via fred-wilson)(via fred-wilson)
Hulu to usher in exciting era of not-at-all-free TV streaming by requiring cable subscription
Apparently Hulu would like to compete with Netflix in every arena, including idiotic decisions that cause your customers to flee.
The End Of Hulu
It was (sorta) fun while it lasted.
Actually, it wasn’t all that fun. Plus, I always felt like there was the very real possibility that in the end, stupidity would win out. As it will.
Can’t believe it lasted this long. Still in disbelief that it worked at all.
Antitrust Vs. Antitrust
Good rundown by Nilay Patel of the Department of Justice’s antitrust complaint against Apple and seven of the major book publishers.
The high-level idea, that the publishers wanted to move to the agency model (where they could set prices that retailers charge for their books) and that Apple was willing to give them this model shouldn’t be surprising. The question is if they colluded to do this — and Apple’s supposed “most favored nation” clause certainly doesn’t look good.
This case is actually pretty fascinating because had Apple not accepted the agency model to gain some traction in e-books, we’d probably be hearing the publishers complaining to the DoJ that Amazon was using their monopoly in e-books to destroy their businesses.
Instead, Amazon (seemingly) got screwed and was forced accept the agency model as well. The DoJ doesn’t care about that as much as they care about what that means for consumers — higher prices.
Also interesting is that a bunch of the publishers settled right away to get out of this mess. But as Macmillan CEO John Sargent clearly implies in his open letter, that doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone was doing anything wrong, just that the other publishers did not want to bogged down in legal proceedings for months (or years) and pay all the fees associated with fighting the government.
Macmillan will fight this. As will Apple. And a few others.
Amazon is obviously thrilled about all of this. They want to go back to $9.99 e-books.
I’d love that too — all consumers would. But the issue is really the publishers versus Amazon here. They’re (probably rightfully) worried that if Amazon can go back to completely owning the market, there will be no stopping them from say, replacing the publishers outright one day (which they’re already trying to do).
This really seems to be a two-headed coin. Both sides potentially point to antitrust concerns. It’s about figuring out the lesser of two evils. And depending on your vantage point, that changes.
Though that obviously doesn’t excuse collusion, if it happened.
It is not, as it turns out, necessary to be a micromanaging psychopath with narcissistic personality disorder (or even to pretend to be one) if you just hire smart people and give them real authority. The saddest thing about the Steve Jobs hagiography is all the young “incubator twerps” strutting around Mountain View deliberately cultivating their worst personality traits because they imagine that’s what made Steve Jobs a design genius. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, young twerp. Maybe try wearing a black turtleneck too. For every Steve Jobs, there are a thousand leaders who learned to hire smart people and let them build great things in a nurturing environment of empowerment and it was AWESOME. That doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It doesn’t mean letting people do bad work. It means hiring smart people who get things done—and then getting the hell out of the way.
(via stevewoolf)
Must Read On SOPA
“I like my movies (and music and television) as much as the next couch potato, probably more. And I wouldn’t steal content for any reason, in part because I make a living generating a fair amount of it. But it’s worth remembering that the film industry initially opposed the video cassette recorder and the introduction of DVDs, platforms that became very lucrative businesses for them and remarkable conveniences for the rest of us.”David Carr,The Danger of an Attack on Piracy Online NYT 1/1/12
Today’s flow of creative expression, riding a tide of billions of instantly accessible digital images and clips, is rapidly becoming so free and recycling so reflexive that it is hard to imagine it being slowed, much less stanched, whatever happens in court
Watch this case closely. Will an adverse ruling change anything? Is the horse already out of the barn? Given the current momentum of SOPA and my own experience repping fair use matters, I think it will further narrow these defenses and stifle creative expression.
(via fred-wilson)
