Yes you're right, I actually didn't see that... What's going on?

I saw pg's submission first, and it got killed. (Or deleted.)

Why was my submission killed? --&#62; <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491539" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491539</a>Edit: incidentally, because this submission was made after my submission, when I saw it I flagged it thinking it was a dupe. Now it seems I've lost the ability to flag entirely. :(

[ This comment is unavailable in your region. ]

Right... go tell that to Hulu and Netflix. I'd do it myself, but it's not available on my region. And I'm not even in a 3rd world country! Go figure...

Many new-ish forms of entertainment already use the web as a medium, but that has not helped the region problem much. Hulu, Netflix, Turntable.fm and many many other services are US-only.

GeoIP data is 99% accurate at the country level, so it's trivially easy to enforce regional restrictions on the internet, and some web sites have been doing it for a while. Sure, there are ways around that too, but most people are not technically inclined enough to figure them out. As one article recently posted on HN said (can't find it right now), we need to stop thinking only about technical solutions, and start attacking problems at the political and cultural level. After all, using a VPN to get around a restriction will only work until the authorities (government, RIAA, whoever) find a way to block it. It's a never ending arms race. We need to fix the political problem of censorship in order to achieve a permanent solution.

It's obvious that many new forms of entertainment will use the web as a medium which, barring dictatorships, is worldwide, so you don't have to worry about it, insofar as you have enough bandwidth.

That's not necessarily a problem. Facebook isn't restricted to high-ad-revenue countries. Their costs are so low that they don't mind making much less money in some places than others. The same is true of YouTube.The reason so much content is region restricted is traditional Hollywood licensing deals. Just another example of their outmoded business methods.

If it's funded by ad revenue, there will be no reason to deny the third world.In a sale model, dropping third world prices to locally affordable carries a risk of those copies being brought to the first world and resold. Viewers would buy the imports because they were cheaper.In an ad model, the viewers don't pay. Instead watching an import would mean watching ads which were placed more cheaply, but are probably also less artistic and less targeted. No real incentive.

Ad sponsors from the third world countries themselves have no problem paying for advertising in their own countries.Here in Portugal (not third world, I know) I get plenty of AdWords from national companies, much more than from international ones.

Don't hold your breath just yet. If the new thing gets funded chiefly by ad revenue -- and that's the popular way of funding freemium now -- it will remain regionalized. Ad sponsors prefer certain demographics and third world countries aren't high on their lists.

The regional distribution is definitely something that needs to die fast. I live outside the US, where TV networks buy American tv-series and broadcasts them a year after they are released in the US. No one I know under 30 actually waits for that. They see their friends in other countries talking about the new episode on Facebook and eventually they just end up downloading it. Which is sad, because if they could actually buy it on iTunes (without a US account), they probably would if the price was right.

Alternatively, we might say regions allowed Hollywood to sell the same movie for more in the US than in Africa or China.Same with prescription drugs, also a subject of these SOPA/PIPA laws.

Global distribution territories are like a maze of twisty passages, none of which are alike.Combining the other recent pg essay about schlepping, this is a major schlepping window of opportunity. If someone could find a way to make it easier for filmmakers to reach markets around the world, that would help the overall issue.I don't just mean slap up a youtube clone and call the problem solved, I mean provide access to theatrical and tv gobally.Major schlepping there, but probably a good opportunity too.

It was supposed to be just price discrimination in favor of the third world. Regions allowed Hollywood to sell the same movie for less in Africa or China than in the US. But because of weird business arrangements in international distribution, it sometimes meant they got movies late or never.

I hope whatever kills hollywood also kills distribution by regions. In the third world we are people too.

Not to rehash the entire Cloudant thread again, but if you honestly think Monsanto's way of doing things is just a "different political point of view" then you're disturbingly out of touch with reality.And as I said in another comment:
"..it does sound hypocritical (not sure how many times I can use that word) when you're supposedly fighting for "civil liberties and the world economy" when you have a financial interest in a company benefiting from the likes of Monsanto."

1) Please don't preface your comment with a statement about people downmoding you. All that does is make me think, "well, the following opinion will probably be poorly thought out flamebait". It's also against the site guidelines.2) There's a large gap between funding a company which sells something to a company which has a political point of view you disagree with, and actively sponsoring bad legislation. In fact, I can't see how those two things can even be compared. So, your first statement "I will probably be downvoted" is true. Implicitly you're claiming the downvoting will be unfair, but your claim doesn't make much sense, so that's probably the reason it'll happen.

Why don't you issue a call for people to bring down Monsanto then? You can't feign do-gooder interest just because there's a financial interest. I guess my issue is with consistency. Reading this call to arms just sounds hypocritical. I believe you even called me dumb for voicing my displeasure in the original Cloudant thread.Nothing disingenuous about that.

I take issue with the name-calling: "the people who run it are so mean..." You could say the system is corrupt, broken, blinded by self-interest, etc.There are probably all kinds of people running Hollywood, like in any other industry. There must be some execs with sociopathic tendencies, others who simply go with momentum or believe they are doing what's best for their shareholders, etc. In my opinion, stating that people who run the industry are "mean" is inappropriate for an investment fund.

You may not be able to control them, but you can influence who YC startups do business with. You screen founders heavily based on perceived intelligence, and probably based somewhat on perceived ethics as well. You probably have some sense, before you fund them, whether founders would be willing to do business with the RIAA or MPAA.You could be doing something to dissuade YC-funded startups from engaging with Monsanto. I think it's a valid question why you're putting significant effort into fighting the MPAA and RIAA, even banning SOPA supporters from demo day, while you do not take a visible stand regarding Monsanto.Genetic engineering is outside of YC's core competency, but there are strong parallels between trying to exert tyrannical legal control over digital IP, and trying to exert tyrannical legal control over genetic IP. Unlike copyright infringement which at least requires an infringer, genetic IP spreads itself, and embeds itself into other [public domain] IP that was not originally infringing.Since you've opened the door by taking a stand regarding the RIAA, MPAA, and draconian copyright laws, you shouldn't be surprised when you get flack for being silent on other issues: Monsanto, companies (including Monsanto) directly involved with the drug war... perhaps even private security contractors which operate in war zones, the private prison industry, big pharma, or environmental polluters.

That's the sort of disingenuous remark a politician would make.  It's hypocritical of us to want to fund companies doing good things because one of the 383 companies we've funded has one customer you don't like?  We don't have any control over who companies we fund do business with.

"The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise."This seems hypocritical considering YC's funding of companies like Cloudant that go on to work with companies (Monsanto) actively engaged in the worst kind of subversive geopolitical work. Compared to Monsanto, Hollywood is a shinning beacon of freedom and peace.Of course, going on to read the rest of the article it sounds as though YC is more interested in the financial interests of killing Hollywood than the potential political impacts.

The "next big distribution channel" already exists. Why do you think the MPAA and RIAA keep trying to choke off the internet. Fortunately, they got a late start, so there is a chance to keep ahead of their lawyers.

By implication then is the next big distribution channel already technically feasible?I think history makes it pretty clear someone will jump on it. It sounds like that someone will not be in the US or US-similar copyright regimes.So what kind of business can capitalize on the new distribution model -- without running afoul of the DMCA etc.?It would probably be helpful to megaupload's successor (that assumes megaupload was the next distribution channel) to have an ecosystem ready and crying out for it. It would keep the distribution channel stuffed with _legitimate_ content, thus increasing its odds of survival when it inevitably runs into US Federales.

I think that's not an accurate characterization of the Hollywood entertainment industry.Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I don't agree that they're not about movies. They are about movies and TV-shows. If if were not of the existence of those, then there would be no need, in their eyes, for distribution control. What would they be controlling, an idea factory?If they were only channel and no content, they'd have nothing of value to safeguard. Their reason to exist would cease to be.If Hollywood were _only_ distribution channel, they would have long been disrupted and rendered irrelevant. Their distribution _is_ actively being disrupted by the likes of Apple, Amazon and Netflix --but not the product, so much. They are slowly accepting that they have to acknowledge this new distribution type. On the other hand, Netflix is beginning to create original content --that's not going through the old Hollywood channels, so that's a start to the content production disruption. We'll have to see how that unfurls.In addition, I don't agree with the "mass-produced" qualifier. Each production is not mass produced or stamped out. Each movie (of which there may be ~500/year, and TV episode are unique productions. The qualifier mass-produced brings me visions of millions of identical, easily reproduced productions -I think the attrition rate of new shows and movie flops attest to the difficulty in producing viable content. 
If you meant they were destined for mass-consumption, then yes. But that's altogether different.

Distribution isn't the only issue. The biggest issue is funding. I'd love to be able to fund, directly, my TV and movie entertainment. Right now I feel like I'm at the mercy of anyone with a Nielsen box or the time/money to go the movies every weekend.Perhaps what there needs to be is kickstarter-like project to initiate some project and a corresponding store to keep it going. Probably TV shows would be the easiest to produce this way. Imagine something like The IT Crowd paid for directly by viewer. Or one-off shows like Louis CK's recent comedy experiment. You could get established entertainers and new talent all in the same place if you did it well.

&#62; find something which will eliminate the public's appetite for shared/"public" art experiencesYou kind of just blew my mind with that. I'd never thought of hollywood movies that way, but there's something really fundamental about that.

...it's about maintaining a distribution chokehold on mass produced popular entertainment.I don't think "mass produced" is right, since that term tends to refer to literal assembly lines and to exclude things produced merely in volume via artisan processes.Your broader point is a bit confusing because it seems like you're saying studios don't make movies, they only do X. Actually, I think you're saying that making movies is not the defensible core of Hollywood's power. I basically agree, since there are many producers of quality "content" outside of Hollywood or who could leave Hollywood in an instant.Separately, I don't think they have locked down distribution (in the narrow sense) channels very tightly; there are many non-Hollywood distributors, and it's not that difficult to self-distribute online or in theaters.Sales and marketing--reaching consumers--is difficult. Hollywood may have legitimate skill here and the studios benefit from strong network effects, quantity discounts, etc.Also, Hollywood seems to have decent VCs, as strange as it is to say that. They're able to invest large amounts of money in risky projects and come out ahead more often than not, despite the small average return. This might be a big part of their defensible core.So aside from learning how to market, any solution that seeks to displace the Hollywood system needs to do one or more of the following: find something which will eliminate the public's appetite for shared/"public" art experiences, reduce the capital requirements for mass media, or cultivate a set of sophisticated-enough investors to put $100M down on projects at the prototype stage.

This is true, but you have to understand that there is a phenomenal amount of talent locked up in Hollywood. I'm not necessarily talking about directors or actors, but camera men, DPs, best boys, set dressers...the list goes on and on. These people have skills that require many, many years of on-site training.(Don't forget about producers, line producers, production managers, site scouts, and all of the logistics people who find a way to make a huge movie happen)Making a small, Blair Witch Project/Little Miss Sunshine/indie whatever doesn't require an army of people with these skills. You can get away with some rough edges and end up looking good.But making the next Avatar? That's not a problem that will be solved solely with technology. You have to find some way to extract these guys from an industry that already pays them pretty well.

Agreed. Although discovery isn't just an issue in the film industry; I think it's going to happen everywhere as small scale producers attain the ability to produce great content/products/whatever and the market becomes more flooded with choices than ever before.Here's a article that goes into this: <a href="http://bindle.me/blog/index.php/170/chances-of-discovery-one-in-a-billion" rel="nofollow">http://bindle.me/blog/index.php/170/chances-of-discovery-one...</a>

If Open Source software provides any clues, marketing is indeed a problem.Consider 'Blair Witch Project' which cost US$ 35.000 to make, was sold for US$ 1.1 Mil., and then the company spend US$ 20-25 Mil. for marketing. And this was an awesome campaign."Open Water" cost US$ 500.000, was bought for US$ 2.5 Mil, and the company spend additional US$ 8 Mil. on distribution and advertising.Box Office revenue is more closely correlated to advertising dollars spend than production dollars spend, accorindg to the presentation here: <a href="http://abovethelineproducer.blogspot.com/2011/12/hollywood-profits-quantitative-drivers.html" rel="nofollow">http://abovethelineproducer.blogspot.com/2011/12/hollywood-p...</a>

Distribution is a solved problem. It's open. Even theatrical is more open than it was 5 years ago. NATO wants competitors to Hollywood. In fact, NATO members are beginning to openly compete with Hollywood (see Open Road Films, a joint venture between AMC and Regal).Production is a solved problem. The tools have been democratized.Even financing is open these days. There's a huge range of film financing sources, and as sites like Kickstarter grow, crowdfunding will become more and more viable.What is locked up is marketing. Hollywood is just better at it than their competitors. It's what the studios do that no one else seems to be able to do.To some extent this is an issue of discovery. You can make a film, you can get it in front of people, but how do you get them to know it exists? To me, this is the most productive area to focus on.

Hollywood and the MPAA isn't about making movies.Rather, it's about maintaining a distribution chokehold on mass produced popular entertainment. This in turn means controlling what goes into the pipeline, and how the output from the pipeline is delivered to the consumers, and how the MPPE is marketed -- for example, the whole star system, Oscars night hype, and so on.What is needed is a better distribution channel, and that's why they keep trying to kill anything that looks like it might become one. The solution is thus going to start with (a) invent something, and (b) lawyer up, a long way prior to public launch.

It may easily be the most straightforward RFS you have ever put forward -- at least in hindsight.It wasn't until I read that that I realised how obvious it is that Hollywood is going down the drains.

I understand your point but, multi-player aside, how many $60 games (that's the standard pricing these days for AAA titles) provide 100+ hours? They are very rare. Skyrim is the only recent qualifying game that jumps to mind.

If movies disappeared (which I don't believe they will as the barrier to entry has lowered so much) I would probably just read books and go out more. Games are great and I fully support them but it's not a form of entertainment for everyone.

I think video games is one of the reasons Hollywood is dying in the first place. What other thing in the last 30 years has really been a direct competition to Hollywood. The Internet is definitively on the list too.

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.

Facebook is a good replacement too. Watch the idealized movie of your friends' lives.

Video game industry is nearly as bad as Hollywood.

Does anyone have figures for pokemon red / green (during the first few years of release) vs the whole of hollywood?But I suspect that game production has been Hollywoodised; you have big publishers and big studios and whole teams of people. It's getting better with the rise of indie gaming, but that's still a tiny fraction of the market.

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.

He wants to kill Hollywood, not artists. Personally, I believe that the best way to do that would be to help the artists break free of the middlemen by giving them a better deal and helping them engage with their audiences.Ideally, it would make art an industry where more people make $100k instead of $30k.

No. Rupert Murdoch's intentions are not good. And how ludicrous to make studio bosses into people concerned about the little guy.

One could have made the same argument against someone who wanted to abolish serfdom.

Same argument can be put in favor of any obsolete industry. "We need this industry/office because otherwise those people will have nothing to do and no means of providing for their families."Why don't they get some currently useful job instead of wasting society's resources? Even giving them all unemployment benefits might be cheaper than keeping up costly dying industry.

Remove the first 3 sentences and the last, and your post will be in line with the guidelines [1] and you shouldn't get downvoted. You still make a number of claims I don't see evidence for, including some that you can't possibly back up.The most egregious to me is that you say most of these companies are run by 60 year old men (not that it matters, but are they?) with good intentions (and this matters, do they?). Have you really interviewed a representative sample of them and determined this? I'm more than willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but these are the same people that make sure movies don't actually earn a profit, so profit-sharing clauses of contracts don't kick in, right?OK, so maybe they do have good intentions, but only for the people that work for them. Regardless of their intentions, they do not have the right to continue trying to abridge the rights of every American.Also, have you thought that there might be a better system out there, that creates more value, with less waste, and better compensates those involves? Does a better job of finding and rewarding talent?[2] Have you thought that maybe it's impossible to get to that system through gradual changes, maintaining equilibrium? Maybe disruption is needed?[1] <a href="http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>[2] To me, channel101.com and the Dr Horrible Sing-Along Blog are examples of how we don't need Hollywood as it exists today

Killing the industry is not same as making all those people job less. It's just the equivalent of killing their business model. The artists and others who you are vigorously defending will just find creative work with the new companies (I don't see programmers suddenly becoming actors and directors). And frankly the way most of the artists get screwed by big studios, we would be doing them a favor by providing alternatives.

Yes, the media industry can help to create stupid laws. I don’t deny that. But it isn’t because they’re evil or mean. For the most part it’s because these companies are run by 60 year old men who don’t understand the nuances of technology. But their intentions are good.Oh, okay. Well, as long as their intentions are good, then it's fiiiine that they keep trying to ram bills through Congress that would destroy jobs in my industry and severely cripple our ability to innovate. It's just because they're old, now I get it!Give me a break.Whether well intentioned or not, they've kicked the hornet's nest one time too many, and I'm sick of it. Whether they're naive, assholes, or savvy players that think they have a real shot at taking us down, their actions are clearly hostile to me, and I consider our industries at war. That brings with it a lot of hatred, yes, because I don't consider my industry safe until they stop fighting their fight. Internet entertainment, after all, is the real threat against the movie industry, not piracy, and I don't believe for one moment they'll ever stop trying to kill it off through legislation.Those $30k creative types whose jobs we're evilly plotting to destroy can thank their well-meaning executives that charted the current course when and if we succeed. Quite frankly, anyone educated enough to write for Hollywood could provide far more than $30k of value almost anywhere else, so I'm not sure that pointing out how undervalued talent is in the industry was really the best way to get my sympathy...

We need to support the system so that there can be low level jobs like stagehands that poor writers can use to subsist while writing? Sorry, that argument is absurd. Apparently what those writers need is a low level job, it doesn't have to be in the industry. And who knows, whatever disrupts Hollywood might even make it easier for those writers to make money with their art.That they even have to work their way up the system in low level jobs is perverted.

Lobbyists for SOPA and PIPA have had to retreat in wounded ignorance. Their apologists complain that an attack on Hollywood is an attack on the elderly-- elderly intellectual monopolists (cf. Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine <a href="http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm</a>). And don't forget the outrageous scattershot lawsuits by the MPAA and RIAA. These organizations weren't satisfied with the extortionate judgments they were getting away with (cf. <a href="http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com" rel="nofollow">http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com</a>). They want to impose an enormous negative externality on the kind of businesses that YCombinator invests in. Venture capitalists threatened to stop investing in Internet companies if SOPA and PIPA became law. It's too late to complain that these are basically good people.

On the topic of residuals and the intentions of studios ("Their intention is to keep money on the table of all those creative people. To keep paying residuals to actors who might not find work for years at a time."):First, in 2007 the CEO of Warner Bros., among others, called for an end to residuals [0]. Second, studios are notorious for creative accounting which results in people with residuals on "net" profit being paid nothing; for instance, one of the Harry Potter movies grossed $938 million worldwide but "lost" $167 million [1], [2] The latter link cites a court saying the way Hollywood determines pay for authors was "unconscionable" (I wish its citation was to a source that's online). And third, I don't have a reference at hand for this one because I heard this on NPR years ago, but there was a trial where a studio accountant was questioned about the accuracy of movie profit statements, and he said that in his entire career he'd never seen a single movie where the accounting was accurate.[0] <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/business/media/11cnd-guild.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/business/media/11cnd-guild...</a>
[1] <a href="http://www.deadline.com/2010/07/studio-shame-even-harry-potter-pic-loses-money-because-of-warner-bros-phony-baloney-accounting/" rel="nofollow">http://www.deadline.com/2010/07/studio-shame-even-harry-pott...</a>
[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchwald_v._Paramount" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchwald_v._Paramount</a>

When the current entertainment cartels are replaced by lighting and shading algorithms, algorithmically generated or enhanced sets and story lines, artifically-intelligent actor agents and remotely live-actor operated machinima drones, the world will be a more creative and entertaining place. I for one welcome the coming Diamond Age.To quote Public Enemy, burn Hollywood burn!

The studio system makes some sense with the current system of production and distribution.If production and distribution was disrupted then there is some reasonable possibility that more money would end up in the hands of the creative people instead of the middlemen.

I work for a carrier. People simultaneously depend on our services and actively hope for our demise. So I hope you understand the context when I say you need to thicken your skin.The motivation for an attack is irrelevant. Threats are things that need to be planned for appropriately in a business plan. Pretending the entertainment industry is not as ridiculously overpowered relative to the revenue it generates only works with the hyperbole you have injected. Well done, but I am not falling for it.I doubt your friends are as naive as you. So if it is any solace, you should find great comfort in the fact that the industry is sophisticated enough to survive for a few more paltry tablescraps for the next 20 years or so.

You’re an ass.Pardon the bluntness of that statement but I’m home right now because this pissed me off so much. So my tone is less measured. Have you even contemplated all the things the industry you’re trying to “kill” does?Make note of something: Hollywood is one of the most unionized workforces in the United States. This isn’t a story of rich studio heads taking advantage of people. Actors, Writers, Stage Hands, Directors, and just about everyone else in Hollywood is in a union of some kind and there’s a reason for that.Creativity is random and creative people can’t count on steady work. So they need equitable pay to survive.There’s an organization called Chanel 101 in LA. It’s basically a bunch of creative people showing their work (they put the stuff online if you want to google it). What the great majority of these people have in common is they work in the industry. Not as actors or writers but as stagehands, clerks and other low level positions. They are the people fighting their way up through the system and the system is designed to support them while they do. 
The system you’re trying to kill is what keeps those people alive. What puts food on their table so they can keep working towards their dreams. Because they aren’t programmers. They can’t go out and get an $85,000 a year day job that allows them to live comfortably while they tinker on a startup in their spare time.The studio system, as obnoxious as it is, exists for a reason. It’s an equilibrium that’s developed over decades of creating media. Every few years you’ll see a famous actor form their own studio yet those studios always end up playing by the same rules as the existing studios. Because it’s still roughly the most equitable system available (and if you don’t believe that you should feel free to try and start your own studio)Yes, the media industry can help to create stupid laws. I don’t deny that. But it isn’t because they’re evil or mean. For the most part it’s because these companies are run by 60 year old men who don’t understand the nuances of technology. But their intentions are good. Their intention is to keep money on the table of all those creative people. To keep paying residuals to actors who might not find work for years at a time. To keep funding movies where there’s no guarantee of profit and keep all those stagehands, clerks, and so on employed.It is quite frankly unconscionable for a millionaire to lead a bunch of people who can make over $100,000 a year in an effort to kill off the industry that’s paying all the folks who make less than $30,000.(Let the down votes commence)

This post nails it. You're talking about disrupting two things, neither of which are entertainment: distribution of finished goods (external), and the system within that's been in place since the fall of the studio system in the '60s (internal). Neither of these things have that much to do with entertainment. Technology has made being a filmmaker far, far cheaper than it used to be even in the heyday of indie film in the 90s, though there is still a high financial barrier to entry to pay for all the quality things you need on a set (oh, an idea!). Entertainers absolutely embrace innovation, both creative and technological. It's structures that don't.Here's two specific targets: Creative Artists Agency and the Screen Actors Guild. Good luck.

I agree that the question is limiting, but not necessarily wrong. By creating a new form of entertainment, one can take over a portion of Hollywood's revenue pie and that in a way will create havoc for Hollywood, but not necessarily killing Hollywood since there will be bound to be people who likes Hollywood productions (especially since Hollywood has the finance to fund multi-million dollar productions in a whim).What Hollywood fails to do is to listen to the voices of common people like me and you. Over and over again, Hollywood has produced films that fail to deliver and blame it on piracy. The point is that there will still be people who wants to reward quality content (or at least this is what I believe) and there needs to be a way for current technology to show this. We need to create a technical platform to reward quality content and show Hollywood the light! I have proposed a startup idea somewhere on this page on how to do this, as well as a way to entertain people like you and me. I would love to hear your input =).

The original post ends by asking the wrong - and an extremely limiting - question.Technological innovations of camera/film/projectors (and later broadcast &#38; receivers) made motion pictures possible. These came first. The current "Hollywood" production-distribution-revenue model came after, as a result of the economics of what it took to make motion pictures profitable. So, "Hollywood" is less the entertainment, and more the means by which that entertainment is produced and distributed.Therefore, if one wants to "Kill Hollywood", one doesn't doesn't do it by asking merely "What's the most entertaining thing you can build?" One does it by changing the economics in a way that renders "Hollywood", at least in terms of current studios-distributors-theaters (and studios-channels-Xcasters) model, untenable.The question to entrepreneurs that the original post should have concluded with is "What can you make that makes making and distributing engrossing entertainment (whatever form that may take) cheaper/easier/more accessible/more capable/more profitable/more easily funded?"Unless your interest does lie specifically in investing in the entertaining things. Cool. Innovative entertainment may result, but I wouldn't expect any of those investments to result in the thing that "kills Hollywood".

Our platform, Gickup, lets developers create interactive game shows, which I believe is what you are asking for. Here's a recording of one of our games: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxJZtEL8LZM" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxJZtEL8LZM</a>. You can read our longer response here: <a href="https://plus.google.com/104744911050510468464/posts/GRfzgSuST3p" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/104744911050510468464/posts/GRfzgSuS...</a>

With all due respect, if YC wants to focus on something outside your standard fair I'd suggest you look at the problem of manufacturing. The NY Times article that is the subject of another HN post is right on the money as far as the issues surrounding manufacturing --of just about anything-- outside of China.<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=2&#38;hp" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and...</a>If you want to give back to the country, principles and culture that quite literally gave you everything you are today I'd suggest putting money and brain-power to work on this very problem. Develop new advanced automated manufacturing technologies that the world has yet to even imagine. Develop new work-flows, materials and processes. Develop new supply chain paradigms and environmentally-friendly systems. Develop tech that will bring back millions upon millions of jobs lost to, effectively, slave labor.Make Artificial Intelligence and Robotics the next big thing. This is the future.Hollywood, is doing a good job of destructing itself. And, in the grand scheme of things, they are just about insignificant.

LOL @ Jessia not "talking you out of doing something crazy." You didn't do anything crazy, you put up a web page that says "I think Hollywood is doomed!". And that says you possibly might be willing to bet a few grand on someone who agrees with you, maybe. Oh Paul, you daredevil you!

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.

Yes but it's expensive to mass produce the type of content that Hollywood does. You may need a cheaper form of entertainment, where the content can be crowdsourced, where the production is quick, cheap, etc.Making custom crap for MMORPGs, short youtube clips, vblogs, podcasts, rage comics etc. are cheap and quick, but not entertaining enough.<a href="http://www.xtranormal.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.xtranormal.com</a> style tech isn't there yet.

I think you're confusing the medium with the distribution method.If you accept that modern-day Hollywood is in trouble, it does not necessarily follow that a solution needs to replace video as a multimedia narrative medium. While that very well might happen, the root of the problem is the distribution channel, not the content.

At least to me, the most important part of trying to make a current media killer is remembering that storytelling is still a fundamental part of society, and not all forms of entertainment (including a subset of video games) do not scratch that itch. To truly replace Hollywood I think you need to come up with new ways of filling that need.Since books obviously don't quite do it (need for visual/audio component for some people, perhaps?) something else will need to do it.Perhaps focus on interactivity with real story behind it in games and taking that to the next level? Lots of potential, but have to keep in mind what niche they're filling.

This RFS makes a lot of assumptions, some through analogies, that are all predicated on some level of rational thought. And ultimately, I think that's where this is flawed. Hollywood may be dying -- I don't really know. But the fact they're going after pirates or filesharers or whatever could just be a principled stand for them. I've certainly wasted time and money trying to rectify things that are wrong in my eyes, even if it's not exactly rational or in the best interests of the bottom line. But, to me, it's a matter of principle. And I think for some of these distribution folks, they very much believe it's a principled stand for them as well shrug

Hollywood only allows a tiny fraction of people with talent to suceed... The remaining 99% who never got into hollywood would want to work if they could succeed. Probably becoming millionares rather than billionares.

If you can get the artists on your side, you can kill hollywood.

Except the money for #1 comes from studios and production houses, who incidentally are the ones distributing the content as well.

&#62; Ecosystem implies some sort of balance, where in fact it is a cutthroat competition [...]You don't know much about biology, do you?

1) is a naive description. Ecosystem implies some sort of balance, where in fact it is a cutthroat competition for the favors handed out by 2).Because 2) holds the keys, 2) controls the message.In other words, I would _gladly_ kill #1. #1 is dysfunctional: some sort of willing imprisonment for artists for the sole benefit of #2.

This strikes me as a bit naïve. Hollywood can be seen as two different things:1) An ecosystem of artists creating music, movies and TV shows.2) A group of companies distributing and commercializing the output of the ecosystem.It's hard to say where one ends and the other one begins. YC, you may want to kill #2 but not #1.Or do you expect to fund "startups" that create TV shows, movies, or music? If so, start looking for the younger Louis CKs of the world.

I had absolutely no idea, that explains it!

You realize pg was born in England to welsh parents right (although he grew up in the US) ?

I know this is completely off-topic, but pg: reading that football analogy from an American makes me love you.On topic, is there not space for (if there was enough funding put into it) a new studio, one that understands the internet and modern culture? I'm not sure it's the content that's wrong, it's the business models around it.

Agreed.Your last point is what I had in mind. The startup sets up its own non-Hollywood streaming video infrastructure, reusing existing services in its software stack when reasonably priced - or for scale. It creates its own customer service back end, and uses HTML 5 for content delivery.

There are not enough players in the streaming industry to negotiate. If you lose one you will not be able to make enough money from the other 2. They know this and will be able to low ball you. They also pay a flat fee up front based on how much demand you can prove for your product. Small studios cannot prove demand very well.You would be better off going straight to the physical distributors like RedBox and selling the rights to Netflix once you can show some demand for the product.Or, you could set up your own streaming site that lets users view the pilot for free. If they like it that can preorder the first season. With enough demand you can afford to sign that show.

Here is an idea for the taking: bypass big-studio production, theaters, cable &#38; physical media sales/rental, and go direct to streaming video rentals, e.g. to Amazon or Netflix, or set up your own streaming infrastructure. This business model is disruptive by capping allowed production budgets and greatly reducing distribution expenses.Produce content digitally. Have subscribers pay a recurring fee to genre-oriented channels like TV but implemented as streaming rentals only. IP is protected similar to existing streaming content.Avoid content production competition from Netflix or Amazon by genre focus, e.g. just military sci fi, or youth romance.Non-broadcast, video on demand can be also targeted at adult audiences - imagine something like the original content HBO produces but with direct-to-consumer streaming video bypassing cable.Exit by selling startup to Amazon, Netflix, Google (YouTube), etc.

It's the studio and record label system that needs killing. The creative, skilled people who make entertainment and art need to be able to thrive.

Yes! I was thinking the same thing. I'm hoping many more will come to this conclusion:<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3490496" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3490496</a>Artists are the key. Can we offer them something better than the existing system? The answer would suggest content production, but how is it funded initially? Is it crowd sourced? Do investors take on the initial risk? Do we make it easier for people to purchase subscriptions to the (new) content they enjoy while giving artists a much higher percentage of revenue?

It's under the radar because its appeal is very, very limited. My mom will read Asterix, but Penny Arcade is completely uninteresting to her.We're living in somewhat of a hacker bubble where what happens on Youtube or Boing Boing is significant. The rest of the world, however, does not care. The rest of the world likes Hollywood.

I find it utterly fascinating how under the radar a lot of the new media has been.Only recently have some people begun to appreciate that Netflix has as many subscribers as many large cable companies, though I think it's still flirting with the popular consciousness so far. Meanwhile, there are many people making their living off of original content posted to youtube or elsewhere, and in some cases they are making 6 figure incomes.The Guild, Penny-Arcade TV, vlogbrothers, Dr Horrible, etc, this is an incredibly rapidly growing phenomenon. Yet good luck finding a story about it in the traditional media, it might as well not exist.Meanwhile, online comics are quickly upstaging print comics. There will come a day in the next few years when the aggregate revenue from web comics exceeds that from the traditional comic studios (DC, Marvel, etc.)I wonder at what point these phenomena will start to penetrate the mainstream, when the average guy on the street will start to "get it".

Look back a hundred years (or so).  Even if you shot the people who invented colour film or sound in films, somebody else would have developed those.

That was exactly what I was going to ask.  PG, would you mind explaining the predetermined wording?  It seems counter intuitive for someone who funds disruptive companies to say so I have a sense that there is more to it.

I honestly believe that technologies like Flatr will make this possible.You have to lower the barriers to having people purchase content. There's a mental barrier which stops you from spending $1 to watch another episode of House. Even though you like House, and you'd like to watch another episode.And for "free content," well, ads suck. Nobody likes ads. We don't like being forces to watch ads, before we watch content. People who buy ad space don't like you to be able to skip their ads. YouTube is trying to pitch "skippable ads". Still not close enough, I think.If I watch Sherlock from the BBC and like it, I Flatr it. I think that model works. I'm not sure - but that's my hunch.Humble Indie Bundle is another great example - but I don't think it works for broadcast video.

Probably worth noting that the inflation-adjusted list, while more accurate than a non-adjusted one, is only the American domestic gross. It's quite plausible that the international gross would look different - one might expect that the trend there for Gone With The Wind would look a bit different to Avatar.

and every few years there is a new "biggest grossing film of all time."That, at least, can be accounted for by inflation: <a href="http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm" rel="nofollow">http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm</a>Titanic (1997) is the most recent in the top ten (at #6). Avatar is the most recent at #14, and one of only two movies from the 2000s in the top 30. Movie revenue is dropping. Roger Ebert has a rundown of why 2011 was such a terrible year:<a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111228/COMMENTARY/111229973" rel="nofollow">http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...</a>As for TV- no, it isn't in such a decline. But more and more people are watching online, and the existing TV networks don't have the stranglehold on content that they do on cable/etc. A lot of people watch stuff on YouTube, Netflix is making original content... there is space to disrupt TV watching yet.

If you adjust for how ticket prices have grown over the years, the highest-grossing films of all time are:1. Gone with the Wind2. Star Wars3. The Sound of Music4. E.T.5. The Ten CommandmentsSo in those terms, we haven't actually had a new highest-grossing film of all time for seven decades. The nominal biggest movie ever, Avatar, really only comes in 14th.Source: <a href="http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm" rel="nofollow">http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm</a>

Those top grossing numbers are deeply affected by the entertainment landscapes of their eras. Movies played for much longer in the past and there were fewer other entertainment options. So it is not apples to apples.

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.

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 film of all time." That doesn't necessarily constitute growth, but it hardly seems like the type of upheaval occurring in the recording industry.Is this analysis incorrect?

All the tech is in place, too. Havong a Torrent app with RSS support, I already have my homeserver box follow and automatically download new episodes of many series I watch, making them instantly available for my TV and other devices via DLNA. Webcomics almost all provide RSS, too, that can be followed by any RSS reader app. The only thing really missing is an all-in-one user-friendly package to put the whole experience together, to make it useable for an average consumer...

I think it may be the other way around. With the right curated lists of content, it would be more worthwhile to stream instead of downloading everything.

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.

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 now, you'll be set.Not only that, but you'd encourage more people to produce content, since viewing it and following new episodes would all happen in one place.

This battle will be long and tedious gentlemen with setbacks for both sides... but I can see it slowing degrading for Hollywood and you can bet new legislations will make sure they will remain with considerable power for decades after their market lost all appeal and logic sense of existence in a digital world.

I don't think it's about sex, the answer is a lot less Freudian and a lot more obvious: it's about the joy of being able to make an imprint on another human being's mind &#38; soul. It's as old as humanity itself is.

By that line of thinking ( warning: i would punch an evolutionary psychologist anytime ), Porn should be considered the highest and most effective form of art (or simply, like monkeys we could jiggle our junk instead).

This is insightful.  Along the line of discussing what art is really about (not money), I would say that it is about sex.  Art will not go away if it's no longer possible to become a millionaire doing it.  Some evolutionary psychologists propose that art is a never ending game of creative one-upmanship.  Women find creative men sexy, men find creative women sexy (the reasons for this are complex and have to do with the mechanics of sexual selection -- I won't go into it here).  How do you show people that you're creative?  Entertain them.  Make them laugh.  Make them think.  Make a movie, make a song, write a book.  Recommend a movie, recommend a good book.  You might not get a million bucks out of it, but you might get a husband or a wife.  The real game is helping people show their creativity.

Yes but invariably they were not rich. In fact too many died in poverty. The commercial, popular art era started when copies became available to the market, and it ends when copies become zero cost.Hollywood's obsession with mega-productions tends to be an attempt to force-feed mediocre movies rather than advancing the arts anymoreBTW, Coppola suggests 3 rules1) Write and direct original screenplays,2) Make them with the most modern technology available, and3) Self-finance themTechnology has made it trivial for almost everyone to have (2) and (3). Now technology should create avenues for artists to receive a fair compensation for their work, but they should know that it will be nothing like the exorbitant commissions of the past.

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.

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.

Even in a world of exclusively free (as in beer) software, programmers can exist and make money in a variety of ways; for instance, writing custom software for businesses, giving away ad-supported programs, or selling access to server-side applications.Your comment is excellent and made me consider whether an analogous situation could arise with the arts. Clearly it's important to have dedicated, full-time artists, just as we need software engineers. And both professions take a lot of study and practice.I think professional artists could exist even when they can't sell their end products. For instance, they could be consultants contracted to produce informational or promotional videos for a business. Such consultancies may even create and give away short entertaining movies or something to raise brand awareness and attract creative talent, in the way that software companies often contribute to open source projects.Additionally, a serial-type scenario could work, where an artistic group is paid up front on a periodic basis to continue telling a story.So I think in the hypothetical situation where all art is free (or at least freely reproduced and distributed once its been created) it's still possible to have professional artists creating high quality work. Certain things, like $100MM summer blockbuster movies (unfortunately) might not work, though.

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 culture.Composers for example may receive some income from the wealthy or, from the 20th century, grants, but are generally teachers (Vivaldi, Beethoven, Schoenberg, most modern-day composers not working in the film/tv industry) or held posts at the local entertainment theatre: the church (Bach, Handel..).

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.

And just to add to the "everything is a copy of a copy": the French New Wave was a reaction to Hollywood itself.  Godard and Truffaut were infatuated with genre studio pictures, and most of their best work was a result of their passionate desire to tell Hollywood style stories.  They told them with the resources available to them, which gave their films a particular aesthetic.  You could call that aesthetic "enthusiastic budgetary disregard."  Check out Shoot the Piano Player to see what I mean.

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 -- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_new_wave" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_new_wave</a>?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 creation in the hands of new people. Its influence continues today, though the studios regained their power after a generation. The movement was influenced by new technologies, so I don't mean to imply they are independent.I hope people think about other ways of thinking about change than just technology and business plans.

It would look like free software looks as compared to Microsoft: edgy, unpolished, more engaging with the audience as a collaborator and not just an consumer, in more niches, non-monolithic, with a more visible connection to the author's humanity.<pre><code> :help uganda
 :wq</code></pre>

My general retort to "it's not stealing", is that it is theft of service. Say you went to get a hair cut, and didn't pay for it. That would be stealing the service. Same applies if the provider of a service splits the purchase among multiple buyers (like an actor in a play, performing for a 1000-seat audience). Anyone that snuck into the theater would be stealing the service. So by extent, the same should apply to the larger case of produced works (single creator, multiple customers splitting the cost).On the flip side, it doesn't necessarily follow that every one who enjoys the benefits from a created work actually owes the creator anything. Like if you are listening to a CD at a friends house -- does every one in the room then own the artist? Or anyone who admires public architecture. So historically, it has come down to that if there is money to be made off of a created work, it is the original artist that should benefit from it (in the case of publishing books, music, etc). That model works (morally) as long as producing copies of a work requires enough capital investment &#38; individual unit costs so that the publisher is almost guaranteed to need to turn a profit off of each unit -- some of that profit should go to the creator. But that model breaks down when you have zero cost / no profit sharing between individuals. Now we are back to the pre-publishing era again.

&#62; Interesting thought experiment: how would the world look like if all art was created by hobbyists? (honest question)Linux.

In the world of traditional music, it's already the case that many of the best musicians earn their living doing something else.Jerry Holland (RIP) was a world-class Cape Breton style fiddler, I'd guess almost everyone involved in "Celtic" fiddle knows at least one of his compositions. It took me finding three bios of him before I found one that even mentioned what I remembered from meeting him ten years ago: he made his living as a carpenter. Nine months a year he did that (with occasional gigs), and then come summer he'd go out on the festival circuit playing fiddle. <a href="http://www.cranfordpub.com/articles/holland_%20interview.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.cranfordpub.com/articles/holland_%20interview.htm</a>Brian Conway is another example. He's probably the best New York / Sligo style fiddler alive, but his day job is as a lawyer in a district attorney's office. <a href="http://www.brianconway.com/music.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.brianconway.com/music.html</a>In both cases the standard of musicianship is impeccably high. You'd never guess from their playing or recordings that it wasn't a full-time job for them.

I find this opinion more honest and convincing than the "it's not stealing if you both get to keep a copy" argument. The latter fails to account for the time, money, effort, inspiration, talent required to create the original work that is subsequently copied millions of times. When the issue of how are artists supposed to make a living in an copyright-less, free-filesharing world is brought up, proponents come up with limited band-aids (live concerts, donations, SaaS, etc).At least Coppola doesn't beat around the bush: filesharing may mean that professional artists may have the fate of buggy whip makers. Regardless of one's stance on this prospect, this is where the debate should focus, not on the semantics of stealing or new business model cop-outs.Interesting thought experiment: how would the world look like if all art was created by hobbyists? (honest question)

&#62; There would be no Godfather without Hollywood. No Apocalypse Now. (also no Taxi Driver, no Star Wars, no Indiana Jones, no MASH or Nashville) In the absence of Hollywood, you get movies like Youth Without Youth and Tetro - two wonderful oddities, but you'd be hard pressed to make the case for them against Coppola's early masterpieces.Those movies you mentioned were a result of being within/outside Hollywood, not a function of Hollywood's existence.

There would be no Godfather without Hollywood. No Apocalypse Now. (also no Taxi Driver, no Star Wars, no Indiana Jones, no MASH or Nashville)So what have they done lately?I think you're proving the point. They're an empty shell of their former greatness and should be put out of their misery to make room for whatever great thing is to come next.

I believe the problem isn't the existence of Hollywood, but that too much power is centralized in the hands of too few. Competition within the city can be likened to a Duopoly; competition in name, but far from it in practice.I remember reading about how the RIAA companies engineer their licensing contracts in a way that forces maximum payoffs [1], and I wouldn't be surprised to find those problems in Hollywood as well.[1]: <a href="http://gigaom.com/2011/12/11/why-spotify-can-never-be-profitable-the-secret-demands-of-record-labels/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2011/12/11/why-spotify-can-never-be-profit...</a>

I love FFC. I'm a current UCLA film student - Coppola's alma mater. One thing to think about: UCLA has always been the "indy, intellectual" film school. It's our rep, internally and (to an extent) externally. When Coppola left UCLA to work in Hollywood, he was branded a sell-out by his fellow students.One thing to think about w/ this whole "crush Hollywood" thing is this: most of your favorite movies (assuming you've got a boner for the New Hollywood period like I do) were a result of an aging, out-of-touch entertainment monopoly making desperate, reactionary moves to save itself. The old system didn't work, the people in charge had no idea how to fix it, so they went crazy taking risks on young directors. FFC, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, de Palma, Lucas - all the really top-drawer American filmmakers, honestly - were a result of this period of blind desperation.There would be no Godfather without Hollywood. No Apocalypse Now. (also no Taxi Driver, no Star Wars, no Indiana Jones, no MASH or Nashville) In the absence of Hollywood, you get movies like Youth Without Youth and Tetro - two wonderful oddities, but you'd be hard pressed to make the case for them against Coppola's early masterpieces.The beautiful and horrible thing about Hollywood is that it's a system designed to throw huge stacks of cash at storytelling problems. It's fucking absurd, because money has never been capable of solving those kinds of problems - practice and gut instinct are what create good stories. But when strong storytellers are placed in an environment which supplies nearly unlimited resources, totally amazing things happen. Yes, we can all point to Heaven's Gate, New York New York, and Coppola's own One From the Heart, but flops like those are the inevitable flip side of the system I've just described: talented people can abuse unlimited resources just like anybody else.I guess what I'm saying is: I'd be seriously depressed if Hollywood were to vanish. Yeah, it produces a lot of shit, but its high water marks have never really been replicated by any other mode of production.

I thought Mozart was buried in a pauper's grave in accordance with the tradition of the day.

Here's Mick Jagger saying basically the same thing last July:"Before recorded music, incomes depended largely on the whim of patrons - meaning even Mozart and Schubert died destitute."<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10581280" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10581280</a>

That is because the distribution channel is skimming all the profits. If YC'ers made a new distribution system for content creators it would start with young people fresh from film school doing all the work. But after that takes off you will see the Coppola's of the world doing the math, and shifting their allegiances away from the studios and towards the new world.

Entertainment often involves art made by artists, but things can be entertaining with no art or artists involved. Nascar races, reality shows, youtube videos of people using chainsaws, reddit threads.

Awesome quote. But IMHO a better and more accurate point to make about composers and musicians 200 years ago, was that they produced, and produced, and produced. Being a composer or musician was about composing and performing. Artists had ownership in the abstract (that is authorship was important to the 19th century audience), but a musician being payed for a composition or performance was not significantly different to a baker being payed for his bread.You go back further and find Bach writing masterpieces on a daily basis which he could only assume would be performed once or twice, put in a box, then thrown out when his successor took over.

Exactly my thoughts...Everyone still loves series and movies!!!
A new proposed entertainment would go parallel and not kill hollywood...There has to be a proper, cheap/free "itunes for series and movies". NOW!Who's up for it? :)roberto.cr

Maybe there is a solution in making the financial situation about a creator more transparent. Then I would pay if their minimum is being threatened; or only consume if they are wealthy enough.

Here is what Francis Ford Coppola has to say on the matter:<a href="http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-On-Risk-Money-Craft-Collaboration" rel="nofollow">http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-O...</a>"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 they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it."

It would nice to see other people start creating quality content or shows that could really connect with people. Heck, there is probably a lot of good content already online that I don't know about it. But, I really like what revision3 is doing by creating and I hope they can add more shows.

Id like to see more content production companies, like revision3 or some of the big youtubers, but aimed at mainstream audiences. I think that would be a good first step.

If course, this RFS appears on a day when I have my working demonstration site down, (because I'm laying in new optimizations). I have been working to seriously disrupt "Hollywood" and the media advertising industry for several years now. There are a few places where interested parties can see brief descriptions, I'll list them in a bit. What I'm building is globally patented by me as well. I've developed an automated visual effects pipeline and globally scalable distribution infrastructure for automated actor and object replacement in filmed media - creating a new Personalized Advertising platform where anybody can appear in prepared media with anybody else doing anything. This is photo realistic visual effects, of the same caliber as ILM enhanced feature films - that's the world I come from (Rhythm &#38; Hues Studios, actually.) 
Interested parties can read bits at these locations:www.about.me/Blakes &#60;- my mission is described therewww.BlakeSenftner.comwww.Flixor.com &#60;- 3 year old demo video thereThis is offline at the moment, but as soon as this is ready I plan a HN announcement:www.cg-general-store.comI'm bootstrapping this, after spinning my wheels courting VC investors for too long. Interested parties that want to collaborate can contact me. This is real.

The tech wave already happened; it's called CGI. Like any effective tool, whether CGI augments or substitutes for creativity depends largely on the creator.

I would love to see a technology wave wash over Hollywood the likes of which we saw with the introduction of Desktop Publishing on the print market 25 or so years ago.Very little comes out of Hollywood these days with any creativity, originality or soul. If there was ever a market ripe for the picking, that's it.

We were younger back then too. Now put that in a bottle and you could replace more than Hollywood!What I miss from that time was the ability to sit around with friends and argue about simple issues of fact. E.g. "who was the actor in that old movie blah.." "no it wasn't, it was ..."Smart phones + IMDB &#38; Wikipedia killed that. How could one bring that back?

Anyone else remember the days before the internet/smartphone? I distinctly remember spending the majority of my time hanging out with friends, playing in the park, etc. I can't recall the last time I even went to a park anymore... Maybe we need to do more of that.

How is that even legal? The UK is a common law system like the US. Doesn't it have a court case similar to Feist v. Rural in the US that establishes jurisprudence that data cannot be copyrighted?
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural</a>

Speaking of soccer in terms of entertainment it is almost as bad as Hollywood and in some areas worse. Like Hollywood all online deals are careful not on step on established players toes (DirectTV, TimeWarner, et al). You can pay $15/month to watch games live online, but any game involving marquee teams is delayed.The FA in England takes it a step further and doesn't even allow unauthorized publication of fixtures and statistics. Fan blogs can't post upcoming matches unless they pay a annual fee. A license to display statistics in any media starts at 5,000 pounds ($7,770).A few years back they sued every blog that listed upcoming matches. Suing your biggest fans! It's madness.

This just isn't true. In today's game it's very common for a player with the ball, in the area, to go down after the slightest contact from an opposing player, rather than stay on their feet and shoot.

Yes, but in practice a forward won't take a dive unless he's lost control of the ball.

&#62; Oddly enough, soccer isn't on a level playing field worldwide.I dont see why you would think anything should naturally be on a "level playing field worldwide." Obviously soccer is not since there are certain places where there are huge cash flow in and out and naturally that's where the talents gravitates towards. Both because of massive contracts, prestige, sponsorship, and because of much better training systems from a very young age. There's no one regulating "drafts" like NBA/NFL so it's almost a free market on talents.

Soccer as an international industry needs to be 'disrupted', more so than any other professional sport leagues in the US (NFL, NBA, MLB). Simply because of the flow of talent is very unbalanced, and it's built on a system of infrastructure instead of skill. Oddly enough, soccer isn't on a level playing field worldwide. But that doesn't stop anyone from predicting the rise of Chinese and Indian superclubs like Barcelona or Real Madrid.Personal side note, there's definitely a lot of social leverage there too. Figure out how to pair something to soccer, like education or clean water, and it has to power to spread like crazy.In any case, I think pg's point was that when you've got a scoring chance to go one up, you don't go down for a cheap foul. You take the shot and end the game. * Which is what he's hoping the sleeper underdog startup will do, instead of taking the easy route a-la los Merengues. Yup, I just went there.

The soccer analogy is interesting because when a player is fouled in the penalty area, the player is strongly incentivised to take a dive. A foul on a player with a clear goalscoring opportunity in the penalty area is a mandatory red card for the fouling player, and a penalty kick for the attacking team. This gives the attacking team a clear advantage by having one more player than the opposition, for the remainder of the game as well a penalty kick. Statistically, it is very probable that a professional football player will score from a penalty also.

There is at least one startup I know trying to do that: <a href="http://www.wreckamovie.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wreckamovie.com/</a>

If you can watch 24/7 you really get the life drama.  Not the BS for TV stuff.  Even if the influence of the viewers would be huge at least it would be honest.  "everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame"  Andy Warhol

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley</a>100 million weekly views in its prime and there was really nothing to it. Add interactivity and the social network and some interesting subjects..... Boom there goes the dynamite! LOL

I came here to post something similar to this. With all the adoration over so-called "Reality TV", I'm surprised there isn't more of a movement towards true reality TV. JenniCam and other sites from days gone by come to mind. That sort of thing's entertainment value is questionable, but then so is watching the Kardashian sisters.

EdTV. But interactive also with multiple Ed’s (channels). Free to watch. With adds on the parameter or occasionally a commercial during slow moments. How would it be interactive? There can be options for what your Ed might due. People could “donate” a micro-purchase towards making that option happen. Options, get a new car, go on a trip, get jewelry. Friends could chat while watching a particular Ed and get momentum going towards certain scenarios via social networking.Sorry this is choppy just in a rush.

&#62; Some of the best ideas may initially look like they're serving the movie and TV industries.So that's interesting. My startup somewhat falls into that category. Hollywood is so entrenched that the only way to change it may be to work around it until you're big enough to take it on.As far "dying"-- I'm not so sure. Celebrity, status, fashion, and passive entertainment do not follow the same set of rules as search engines, cloud storage apps, or apartment subletting sites. There is no way to say objectively one form is better than the other from the consumer side of it. Some people still insist on listening to records, but hardly anyone would argue that they search on Alta Vista because they think the results "feel" more authentic than Google.Also, Hollywood has a long history of doing this. If they are dying now because they're fighting this, then were they also dying when the VCR was introduced? Or the cassette tape? Isn't it possible that they simply use the legal system to slow down innovation until they can catch up?

What replaces big budget Hollywood movies is independently developed (cheap) short-films like the crew of freddiew:<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/freddiew" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/user/freddiew</a>If I was a VC I'd buy invest in them to create a new Youtube-ish site for high quality content like that.

These both are technical issues. The first one - maybe there is no need for a director, when you can have multiple versions of a scene - which then can be voted on. The second - the system would have to ensure that that hack would only get paid proportionally for contributing the farts.I know it all sounds crazy, but I'd be wary of underestimating the power of community. There may not be processes to convey such group endeavor yet, but then these are a matter of discovery - also a group effort.

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.

There's collaborative movie producing site Wreck A Movie <a href="http://www.wreckamovie.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wreckamovie.com/</a> which is currently used to produce Iron Sky among other films.I think Iron Sky will be so good that Wreck A Movie might gain some serious traction, checkout the trailer here <a href="http://www.ironsky.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ironsky.net/</a>

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 pay-if-you-like basis. Do you like your new Firefly series? Do you want it to continue, to thrive? Then contribute as much as you see fit. Contribute financially. Or submit screenplay ideas to the project. Make the 3D CGI scenes better, add more details, make animations more fluid. Offer acting - maybe you will be selected by the audience in a democratic process.This must be funded, filming equipment and studio time is expensive, rendering time in the cloud is also not entirely free. But once the equipment is purchased and studios built or contracted, the projects can share them.Go get 'em.

&#62;a project like this is much more of a lifestyle business than a venture businessIf you can gain enough market share there is plenty of money to be made in advertising and affiliation, also consider if you had a successful platform you could offer space for independent film. I am reminded of AtomFilms from a few years ago (I think it has since degraded in quality). I spent many an hour watching independent shorts and animation that couldn't be found elsewhere. There is now mubi.com which seems to do well, I pay for content there, but for sure - there is space for a main-stream non-hollywood media delivery network.

Ha, the timing of this is pretty funny. I have had a start-up in LA for the last year, in the entertainment industry. I spend time in the professional YouTube community (like freddiew, annoyingorange) and spend a lot of my free time meeting people and learning about Hollywood. I especially find the people who are in both industries really interesting.It is very interesting for me, because there are few programmers in the Hollywood and YouTube communities, so there are a lot of interesting opportunities available.I literally just today turned my head towards building the most entertaining thing I possibly can. My thought on it is a site that is super branded for entertainment like break.com or collegehumor.com or smosh.com. And combine that with a big YouTube channel, just like those websites do.But at the same time, it is necessary to see where the eyeballs are currently heading. I think reddit is a wonderful example of a modern entertainment site which can be seen in its huge growth. I would be nice to combine the usability of a site like reddit with the targeted branding of a site like collegehumor.The super interesting thing to me is that a project like this is much more of a lifestyle business than a venture business. BUT THAT is currently a huge difference between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. I see LA as the land of the cash businesses and Silicon Valley as the land of the VC businesses. All of my professional YouTube friends are making straight cash and building large audiences, but will never have a public exit or a huge windfall.It seems to me Hollywood's culture about cash business verse Silicon Valley's culture, is an advantage for Hollywood in creating entertainment properties. Entertainment properties require a careful and focused branding for a focused demographic and audience, you can make millions off something like this, but it is hard to IPO.

Can you imagine what the complete works of Shakespeare would look like if he were responsible for releasing any of the folios we use today?The whole idea of being absolutely loyal to the artist's intent is a cultural idea that has come in and out of vogue, but is largely an artifact of 20th century America. Really, art has always been crowdsourced in some sense or another, and any work of art is in some sense an amalgam.

As a counterargument (although I agree with you in this case): it was just as well George Lucas had less control over the original Star Wars films, as the prequels proved.

Many artists steer clean of Amazon because it is trying to democratize art through crowdsourced development. Can you imagine what would have happened to Blade Runner if Ridley Scott had even less control on the final cut?

I've got three different friends who won $20,000 each through Amazon Studio's script contests.  One guy won 20k twice and has a producer with a very respectable track record attached to one of his projects there now.  My friends are all very happy with their experiences thus far, though everyone is curious what the next steps will be like.

Has anyone tried out Amazon Studios: <a href="http://studios.amazon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://studios.amazon.com/</a>? That seems to be a big step in this direction. Amazon.com has already created a big threat in the publishing industry with e-books and self-publishing. I think hollywood is next with the democratization of content and technological tools.It used to be that to create "Hollywood grade" movies would require tons of expensive equipment and capital. I don't see that to be the case anymore. There is powerful software (some even free, e.g., Blender) and hardware (<a href="http://www.red.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.red.com/</a>) to create high-quality productions at a fraction of the budget.Having worked at a film studio for a few years, I can say that they are definitely struggling to compete. Mostly because they are slow to adapt to the changing landscape. Slow because they either don't want to change or are too arrogant and feel they don't need to make an effort to change.

A while ago I found myself accidentally reading about the origins of Hollywood on the web. There is a surprising amount of writing posted about it. I'm wondering if others are aware where Hollywood "came from". Specifically, who brought it to the US. And why does it have the rules it does, e.g., about what are good or bad characters and themes, about carefully crafted endings, etc.This might provide some insight about Hollywood is going in the future. As the generations pass from one to another.I'll let the curious reader chase up the history on their own. But what I gathered is Hollywood was founded by outcasts, refugees, young men who came from difficult circumstances and were faced with growing up without role models.Are there parallels to today's young hacker crowd?

What monetization options are available in a hyper-efficient distribution model like the one killing Hollywood? Anything besides advertising? Is advertising even enough considering digital media can be manipulated and ads can be parsed out? Are we going to rely on DRM?What about micro-payments? Can we make small payments easy and efficient enough to work? Is flattr scaling well?This sounds like the first hurdle.

While I would like to see Hollywood get competition, I suspect real changes in this industry will eventually come from industry insiders. The success of Spotify is essentially one big lobbying campaign.In the meantime, I would like to see startups that manage to keep an eye on congress while making money. I don't know how, but here are a couple of loose thoughts.- A service that helps people determine who to vote for and who to avoid voting for.- Something that keeps track of representatives based on current issues and where they stand.- An easy way to visualize where backing for new legislation comes from.I'm sure stuff like this already exist, but I suspect it's not easy enough for most people to bother using. It should be dead simple and connect with ordinary stuff people follow in the news.

Idea: Open-source "movies". Both the tools and the resulting content are open-source.(Incidentally, making a good movie doesn't necessarily have to be expensive. However, making yet another boring car chase scene does.)

Another idea: choose your own adventure movies.

As someone who loves tricks and tactics it pains me to suggest this, but one sure way to replace Hollywood would be a frontal assault. Get a ton of money and make your own movies. You would definitely distribute them better than Hollywood, you might be able to make them better too. Do this for long enough and eventually you'll reach a tipping point.

Hollywood might answer this with a 'Request for Discovery' in some future lawsuit.

It's definitely possible to kill hollywood, think about how Old Time Radio was killed by TV.However, whatever kills Hollywood must revolve around storytelling and not just generic entertainment. People won't completely move away from story-based entertainment.

Will it be big? I think so and I think minecraft will be the enabler which really lets it flourish, there are already people out there making custom minecraft maps which these guys play. I could envisage a situation not far from now when they're actively commissioning maps with certain aspects which make watching them being played through even more entertaining.Ultimately I think minecraft will be the ultimate world/set building tool and these guys will use it to make great entertainment.

Thanks for this comment; this is news to me, I had no idea these things existed.I just watched one video and it's just like you said: a combination of talk radio, motion picture and reality TV (sort of like Jackass meets NPR...)Who would have thought watching someone else play a game could be entertaining, but if the player has funny comments and insights, it sure is. That could become big (or is it already...?)

If you define killing hollywood by not actually consuming any of its products either legally or illegally then video game playthoughs are doing it for me.<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/SSoHPKC/videos" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/user/SSoHPKC/videos</a>He uploads between 6-10 ten to fifteen minute video's per day on most major releases. Plus multiplayer games like killing floor, pay day the heist, minecraft e.t.c.A weird mix between talk radio, motion picture and reality tv. And genuinely I'm hooked, if I want to wind down at the end of the day watching half an hour of skyrim walkthrough followed by some minecraft custom maps is perfect.Now here's the interesting part, this guy and a bunch of his friends who call themselves The Creatures (long obscure story) are going to go live in a house somewhere so they can all record video game playthoughs together.That's maybe 10+ people producing collectively 3-5 hours of unique content per day who're getting between 25-100k unique views per video.And that's before they've put themselves in a single physical location. I don't know what they'll end up producing once they are all together in one place, but I'll be watching and a lot of other people will as well.

A big THANK YOU from me. I have been talking to my wife for some time about how I'd like for Internet companies to start taking aim at the same people that are aiming at us. It's not about revenge though, but as a way to move forward past what I see as the old ideas of IP.Besides, entertainment can be better. I believe in what this post says about getting people to actually spend real time together. I know a lot of people who's idea of quality time is sitting in front of the TV wasting away, albeit together.

With this "RFS" who's pitching who?I'm working on the prototype to prove the concept. But there is no GUI, I am strictly a command-line user.What are the "other ways" you allude to?

Pitches don't work like that.  If you want other people's time or other people's money, you better throw some more skin into the game.  The most simple thing to imagine is creating a small prototype.  But there are other ways.

Give me the programmers, UI geeks, the money to pay them to do as they are told, and I will build it.  I have the idea, and it's actually a proven winner, among a smaller segment of users.  Like most other internet phenomena, it's something that was once only done amongst computer nerds only to be later done by the general public as if it was just another usual day-to-day practice.  And it actually involves more friends and family and ideally less mass market products.

So, give me a way to have my cake and eat it too.Give me a medium that adjusts the interactivity demands of the entertainment according to the recline of my chair or the open width of my eyelids. Metaphorically speaking (or not).

I find that oversimplified. Personally, I game to relax and I watch movies to be mentally (and emotionally) challenged.The problem with games is that they, by their very nature, have problems for the storyteller:First, they take away his control from (at least) one of the characters, since it has to be given to the player. This means that either certain stories can't be told as they should, since you can't force the player to have the same motivations as the character, especially if they're supposed to be revealed only later.Second, plenty of great movies would make shitty games. Dialog driven movies (12 Angry Men), for example. You'd need to put the player on rails and limit his movements to a minimum - and to do that, why make a game at all?Third, game play can distract from the story. There's a reason why people tend to make more mistakes when they're recalling a situation where they were participants instead of passive viewers.

Very interesting. A lot of people who suggest games as a replacement for video seem to be missing this point. Games require active interaction. Not everyone always wants to entertain themselves in a way that requires active interaction. Sometimes we just want to sit back, relax, and let the storyteller tell their story. Watching Bruce Willis blow shit up on a screen is a completely different kind of entertainment than blowing shit up on a screen myself.Passive consumerism? Oh yes. But homo sapiens loves it.

Not youtube today.  Though it might come out of youtube one day.

Exactly.  And honestly, the answer to your question is not "youtube."

Perhaps can be argued better storytelling can take place in person, whether via education or live performances - however storytelling in person is an artform, much like proper education is.

That's exactly what I wanted to say: Movies are the latest evolution in storytelling. So the question is: How can we use technology to create a better way to tell stories?If you're a writer you can write a book just by yourself, and there are already many writers that create awesome stories. Furthermore, from all the movies I've seen and all the books I've read, I think that the story in an average book tends to be of higher quality than the story in an average movie.An interesting goal for a really disruptive storytelling technology would be to create a tool that allows a writer to create something that looks like a movie but doesn't require much more work than writing a book.It's already possible to use computers to create a movie without using any cameras, or building physical sets, but it still is a labor intensive and expensive process. Right now you need:* Voice actors to act all the parts* Modelers to create all the 3D models* Texture artists* Animators* Sound effect technicians* Composer &#38; musicians* A rendering farm to render the movieLet's look at each of these items and see if we can find a way to work around it.We can start with the easier ones. You don't need a rendering farm, you can use a game engine to render the story in real time using the GPU.Music &#38; sound effects are also easy to solve. Computers can synthesize music and there are already many composers who allow you to use their music for free or by paying a very small one time fee. You also can buy at a low price a library of sound effects, but below I propose an even better solution for that.Next we have to look at models &#38; textures. This is harder to solve but I think there might be one solution inspired in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. When you install World of Warcraft on your computer you're installing the whole world with all the models and textures, so that when you play the game all of them are loaded on demand from your local hard disk. So, any company that wants to create a tool that enables a single writer to create a whole movie by himself, would have to invest in creating all the models &#38; textures for a large array of different locations (urban, country, desert, jungle, interiors, exteriors, etc.) that the audience would install on their computer. Then writers would have all those locations available to use for their stories. Furthermore, it would be a good idea to allow third parties to create new locations that can be added to the set of available locations. On top of that, if you are already installing all those models &#38; textures on people's computers then you can also throw in good sound effects library.All of the above is easy, in the sense that, although it requires a large investment to create a good set of models &#38; textures for the locations, it doesn't require any technological innovation.Now comes the hard part. The part where we still haven't developed the needed technology. We need digital actors that can play their roles by themselves. The writer should only be required to give them their lines &#38; stage directions. This would require some more research in how to improve text to speech synthesizers &#38; procedural animation. But I do believe that's something that could be solved in the next ten years.

Movies aren't the latest evolution in entertainment, they're the latest evolution in storytelling, something which is as old as humanity itself. Hollwyood is the descendant of ancient man telling stories of adventure around a fire at night.So the more accurate question - what is a better way to tell stories?

What I wonder is, what role does talent play in this transition? I am a hacker by trade but am always thinking about how to "break in" as an actor and be in movies and on television. A myriad of other challenges (including finding the time to compete with a large talent pool) aside, one thing that I realize again and again is that participating in traditional media means supporting and receiving a paycheck from precisely the companies that fund bills like SOPA and think of their customers as "eyeballs with wallets".With the costs of production and distribution ever falling, more and more content is being created outside the traditional media ecosystem. How would I position myself (as an actor or set designer, or sound mixer or etc) to take advantage of the coming transition?Live theater comes to mind as something that might be inline with PG's last paragraph, which suggests more recreational time be spent not looking at screens but engaging with other people.

&#62;&#62; There will be several answers, [...], through new media (e.g. games) that look a lot like shows but are more interactiveSome genres will not be replaced soon by games. The archtypes of How I Met your Mother are the same as in Friends, and they serve to appease our loneliness and self worth. The 'entertainment' TV Shows and Movies are our fantasies coming real in front of our eyes. While action movies are clearly replaced, fantasies on the Social level are a tougher problem we are a long way from solving.

Also consider the thing that got movies into the forefront in the first place was excellent use of the medium. The movies of old, due to lack of technological advancements (or even in some cases due to them) were masterfully crafted in the context of the medium. There have been relatively few movies since that era that have utilized dialog so intimately and intelligently as those that were made in the era where all you really had were cameras and audio. I would tend to think that this would translate into where we are currently. The next initiative that can masterfully take advantage of the obvious things at their disposal and package them up into a tight, sound package will be the ones that excel at the craft - and the ones that can get steer us into a new entertainment era.That being said the only thing I can really think that is equivalent to the old era of movies is mobile or streaming. Both of these have potential to disrupt, but both are trying to force old idioms into new technologies. Youtube at least is trying some new things, regardless of how well that works out.

Hollywood needs to shut up and evolve just like everybody else.

I'm a pretty massive gamer, and one thing I think bears mention is that game companies show similar signs of customer-contempt as the Hollywood middlemen. This leads me to think that the problem is not the people who are creative, the problem is the middlemen who have found exceptional margins and do not want to let them go.For signs of game publisher contempt, see safedisc, securom and similar cases in which game performance, reliability and convenience (in other words, the user experience) have been compromised in order to ineffectually impede piracy.Rather than kill Hollywood, producers of things many do so enjoy, I think startups need to focus on finding ways to allow the creative network of the industry to thrive by reaching people without the need for the collective organizations and legacy businesses who are willing to attack the end-users.Issues or morality and legality aside, suing your users, interfering with their freedom by legal meddling and otherwise tarnishing their experience is a poor choice for purely pragmatic reasons.Killing, ever a tempting solution, is not the best answer here.

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).

Googling results in this: <a href="http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/lucid-dream-machines.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/lucid-dream-machines....</a>

Which machines do you know that induce lucid dreams?

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?).

This is most awesome, however this RFS as it stands now only addresses the demand side of the equation. It should also address the talent side of the equation. People need to create startups that allow talent to reach their audience better, cheaper and faster.Louis C.K. had to do a lot of work to perform his experiment. Why is there no startup equivalent of "Comedy Central" + "HBO Comedy Hour"? If I were a comedian, how do I go from performing standup in a club, to selling that comedy to as many people as possible with as little effort on my part. Were I a comedian, I want to build an audience and make a living telling jokes.This goes for all other forms of talent. Actors, writers, costume designers, etc.Hollywood's talent power is in its Rolodex. How do you take that power out of their hand and eliminate the power brokers?What are some talented actors that are already embracing the internet and possibly willing "invest" in startups using their talent? Ashton Kutcher, maybe? How about Will Ferrell?Also, how do we allow people to easily transition from passive to active and back again? Currently there isn't an easy way to go from the Internet to my TV and back again. How can I go from a link in my Facebook or Twitter feed to sitting on my couch watching a movie in one click? How do I share from my TV to my friends? How do I organize hanging out together with my friends at my house or apartment to watch a TV show or game? As great as products like Google Hangouts are, nothing beats the social experience of enjoy a piece of media together.

Might you consider directly funding artistic startups?It would make sense for each movie or television show to be a corporation mostly owned by its founders (the author, director and major actors). The model looks a lot like conventional VC, except for the shape of the exit.It's not clear if long-form video can be made on YC-like funding. If not, maybe start with music, which clearly can.

Well the next big step in entertainment must involve something like brain-computer-interfaces that induce whole-senses experiences. But storytelling won't go away. Games will not replace movies or theater or books, it's a different genre. People like stories, they crave for stories, even little kids love stories; stories move people; it's what art is about.

Internet's killer app will be interactive.  But the Hollywood killer will be a passive mode of consumption (I still do like just to be entertained)Add to this the rise of Facebook and I would do the following.  Put a microphone and speaker in the corner of each room of the dorms at MIT or Yale (not cameras note, we know where that will lead).  let people talk to their friends, whilst not "using" a device.  Let others listen.  Vote up conversations.  Eventually most people are listening in to the most interesting conversation in College.  I would love it to scale so I can spend an evening listening to the most interesting conversation in the world.Reality TV, Social Media, no longer shouting through to the next room.  It's got everything.

"I'm guessing that Hollywood sees piracy and filesharing as vast amounts of unrealized profit for the work they're already doing"right, but the fact that they are chasing it implies very clearly that they believe there is more money in chasing free cash for work they have already done, than there is in creating new work.That is the sure sign of an industry (or business) that has stopped growing.

You're right, there is zero logic in it. The whole paragraph is a total muddle really.For better or worse there are international laws that protect copyright. They're essentially unenforceable. That these industries clamor for more laws and enforcement when the old ones don't work shouldn't surprise anyone.

Yea, where do you think the claim that every piracy equals a lost sale comes from?

&#62; SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they're resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention.I'm not sure this follows. I'm guessing that Hollywood sees piracy and filesharing as vast amounts of unrealized profit for the work they're already doing -- "free money" essentially.I think it's personal too; look how bent out of shape Scott Rudin got just because David Denby published a review for "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" a week ahead of a previously-agreed-upon embargo: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/dec/05/girl-dragon-tattoo-early-review" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/dec/05/girl-dragon-tatto...</a>Hollywood seems to like having control over when and how their material is released, and on this level piracy offends them on a moral level.

I know that ideas are easiest part, but it's also important we find a viable alternative to classic Hollywood studios and distribution. The solution is actually strikingly similar as to the one for piracy--provide a solution more convenient and effective then traditional methods.What about a vertical launch platform for media--a combination of Kickstarter, LaunchRock, and more, specifically tailored towards media like music or video. Incorporated social aspects to publicize your project while you fund it. Provide reliable recommendations for resources classically provided by a studio. Allow artists a platform to collaborate and share resources. Etc.Make it more effective then going to a classic label. Won't be easy, but it certainly seems lucrative.

In terms of TV, disrupting the current measurement norms would be a great start. The current methods of measurement are horrible at recognising new media, the success of a TV show and it's ability to attract more funding to continue is far to highly dependant on a small number of users on free to air and traditional cable.

Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.