Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood | Hacker News Reader

Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood

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I think what we need to work on is improving the political clout of engineers, not destroying hollywood. We've won this one (I hope) but it took rather extreme measures. Blacking out wikipedia isn't something which can be done every time congress threatens to do something stupid. It's a bit like going on strike - a negative act which can turn people against us if overused. We need mechanisms which can influence politics on a day-to-day level, so we don't need to do these last-ditch operations.

Nevertheless, defeating SOPA is hugely significant, because it shows that we CAN be politically effective. Politics can operate as a kind of nonviolent intimidation: if our opponents have the reputation of being politically effective, and our group has the reputation of being politically ineffective, individuals think it's not worth their time trying to influence politics.

Take software patents. Whenever this comes up, there are always gloomy posts saying that we will never defeat the patent lobby. This perception deters everyone from trying to.

EFF does a good job. But I think more of us need to be active as individuals, on a day to day basis rather than just when the trumpet sounds like this. Suppose there was a website where you could sign a pledge which said: "I will spend 1/2 hour a week working against internet censorship". and then provided stack-overflow-like facilities whereby activists could suggest useful actions and vote on which are the best; and collect data on which arguments seemed most effective. Not only would this make us more effective, it would declare that we were a force to be reckoned with.

Anyone up for making such a website?

The reason this worked out right (still crossing fingers) in my opinion, was because much of the tech community were on the same side in this one. But there are other occasions where this would have been a mess. So, the message would not have been clear. The congress and media would have thought "some people say yes, some people say no... nothing new".

No, I think congress and the media don't normally think about the tech community's opinion at all.

[editted to add] You are right that division makes the message harder to put across. But it's not as simple as that. Take software patents: some people think software patents should be banned altogether, some people think they should be limited to five years, some people think 'obvious' patents are the problem. But most people think that the system is broken. As engineers, our automatic response is to start figuring out what the solution would look like. But the roadblock is not a lack of a solution, but lack of political influence. We can't agree on a solution to the software patent problem, because we won't find out which one works until we get to try one of them out. And the roadblock to doing that is lack of political influence.

I agree. Sadly, political influence costs lots of money. And thats the hardest part to overcome. So, we should first settle our differences (in your sample, how to solve the broken system) to avoid wasting time and money.

Buying political influence is generally a high ROI activity. In absolute terms, it may appear expensive, but in terms of "value" its quite cheap.

More importantly, there are other ways to gain political influence outside the DC money flow. The fight against SOPA and PIPA are an example of that.

As for the idea that differences need to be hashed out so a united front can be presented before trying to influence US politics. Even if such an outcome were desirable or possible (I'm not convinced of either), it would be a mistake to wait.

I think, underneath it all, part of the strategy is to create a legislative and regulatory environment that imposes disproportionate costs on upstarts and small players. In such environments, entrenched players can defend their positions.

It's not about engineers vs. "Hollywood". I'm not even sure what either of those categories are, and I doubt the people who fall into those categories could agree who belongs in them and who doesn't. Also, the distinction is completely meaningless when you consider that many of the labor interests behind the "Hollywood" position are scientists and engineers who do the logistical grunt work of the on-screen magic.

Lose that false dichotomy and the rest of your post stands on its own: we won't win if we give up.

You need to convince millions of people not to watch Dark knight Rising, Transformers, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Twilight, Mission Impossible, and hundreds of other blockbusters and TV Shows, every year.

Then, the hardest part, you need to come up with something that is Waaaaaaaaaayyyy waayyyyy better than all those movies and TV shows combined -- and do it every single day.

Then, you'll kill Hollywood.

In the risk of being down voted to hell, this whole thing seems completely misguided to me. I love the product that hollywood produces. I love great movies and great TV. I frankly think "The Wire" is the best example of story telling I know of. I can think of nothing that silicon valley has produced that even comes close. If Zynga disappeared tomorrow, I could care less, and Hollywood and Zynga are both selling entertainment. Zynga's entertainment value is less than worthless to me. I hope hollywood continues to be a massively successful industry in the hope that the next David Simon is created.

I guess you meant "couldn't" care less? :)

http://incompetech.com/gallimaufry/care_less.html

But I'm in total agreement with you. I too like the productions of Hollywood. I just don't like their political power.

you're missing the point completely. any replacement has to succeed because it's better than hollywood. something even more awesome will come along and replace it.

the argument is not "lets all share files until they go bankrupt"; it's "there is change afoot; whoever can make the awesomest, most loved art / entertainment of the next wave will win big".

you're not a special flower. the stuff you like is mass market. you will like even more whatever comes next - if you didn't, then it wouldn't be the next big thing. the argument is self-fulfilling; yc simply wants to be the one that makes money on it. don't be mislead by the macho "killing" rhetoric.

> any replacement has to succeed because it's better than hollywood. something even more awesome will come along and replace it

Don’t forget, when it comes along, it will probably appear to be worse than hollywood, just as text messaging is worse than email and email is worse than an express envelope.

That’s the nature of a disruption. It’s obviously worse. Until, after the fact, everyone suddenly claims it’s so much better.

It's worth keeping in mind that The Wire is a product of HBO, and cable TV. They are now well established, but they were once upstarts in their own way.

HBO got its start showing rewarmed mainstream Hollywood movies, months or more after their theatrical releasee. This though was enough to make them one of the few bright spots on the vast wasteland of Gilligan's Island and Bewitched reruns that was cable TV. For that, cable operators were able to extract a premium. From there, they branched out into various bits of original programming.

Then came original programming like Oz, Sopranos, the Wire. This was TV that people regarded as art, and as art, superior to anything on network television and hollywood movies.

Other examples to consider, early Miramax and Merchant/Ivory.

"there is change afoot; whoever can make the awesomest, most loved art / entertainment of the next wave will win big"

I think the reason this ycomb call to action is going to fizzle out is because all you excited engineers keep using this language - "art" or "entertainment."

Hollywood doesn't produce entertainment. It tells stories. It's an industry of stories. Stories are deep and primal. Entertainment is distraction.

Despite having terrible profit margins (4-9%), six companies have had a lock-down on narrative film production for nearly 100 years. It's one of the most stable industries in the country. The initial ycomb call to action is probably the most misguided thing I've seen them release. Trying to beat back the most efficient and long lasting storytelling machine of all time with "entertainment" is like trying to dam the colorado river with a cheese cloth.

Moonbot studios and their iPad interactive books might be a model for the next wave of storytelling entertainment. Although, the people doing those are film veterans, and an obvious exit would be a sale of the company to Disney... so it might not change much.

Farm ville is silicon valley's equivalent to Survivor, massive popular appeal zero actual substance. If you want to compare art, I don't remember the last time I enjoyed a movie as much as Portal the video game. And unlike Hollywood it's squeal was bettor than the original.

The problem with the film/games comparison is that film is totally passive for the viewer, games as we currently understand them require active involvement for the full duration.

Well, games may have players AND spectators.

What's to stop the Hollywood competitor from producing shows like "The Wire"? No one said Zynga would be the Hollywood killer. In fact, the "Hollywood killer" might not even exist yet... so how can you know it won't do for you what Hollywood already does before it even exists??

What hollywood has going for it, is a track-record of executing on the operations behind producing movies that make money.

People who invest in movies invest for the same reasons all of us invest in anything-- to make money.

Hollywood is a business, albeit one rooted in entertainment, but let's face it-- many artists are also just in it for the money.

I don't think our world view of "entertainment" is going to shift the way that YC suggested in it's call for action. I think most of us (unfortunately) are still going to want to watch movies like Transformers 3 at a $200 million budget than a $1million dollar indie flick.

So, once we've recognized that uprooting involves figuring out how to finance movie production instead of shifting the realm of entertainment (at least, for our generation, perhaps future generations will just want to watch WOW and starcraft online), then we're getting somewhere.

Unfortunately, figuring out a way to finance a film that costs tens or hundreds of millions to produce is a pretty tricky endeavor.

Still, it will be pretty awesome when Brad Pitt signs onto his first crowd-sourced flick =)

It may not be necessary to compete as directly as that.

Filesharing sites compete against Hollywood in a different way (even though it's illegal) and they manage to grab their attention. What we need is something to give us the same amount of leverage.

You missed the point. File sharing sites don't create content, they exploit Hollywood's archaic and stubborn method of distributing content.

What you're saying is common knowledge.

What I'm trying to say is: Don't compete directly.

Apple didn't compete directly with the music/tv/movie industries but yet they too manage to have a huge leverage over them. And they managed that legally.

There will be a certain metric that matters in competition. We just need to know what that metric is.

You have to ponder the inefficiencies of an ecosystem that supports a $200 million movie.

I'm reminded of Firefly. Such a great show, with lots of loyal fans. I guess it just wasn't a big enough fan base for Fox. I thought at the time that the producers should go independent and distribute straight to the consumer. Maybe that was too risky in 2002. I don't think it would be today.

Not risky, it's just that back in 2002 there were less people watching videos online, many people still had dialup.

I was thinking DVD distribution at the time. I had used Netflix for a while by that point and could imagine subscribing to get a DVD in the mail from Joss Whedon every week.

Don't forget that this was the era when Fox also cancelled Family Guy and Futurama. Both of these series were able to be resurrected due to their DVD sales and syndication numbers. Fox made a lot of mistakes during that time, but were just learning about the secondary sales potential for their shows. I'd like to think that a similar set of shows would be able to stick around longer now. Those shows were able to be resurrected easily because they are animated. Firefly, not so much. But another show (Arrested Development) cancelled by Fox in that era is getting resurrected by Netflix, which while not straight to consumer is more direct than through the studios.

Also, Joss Whedon (and the rest of Hollywood) I think learned a lot about distributing directly to the consumer with Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog. I think that this grand experiment was a good template for future direct-to-consumer productions.

Unfortunately, you still have to deal with the problems of initially funding large movies. I can imagine a system where instead of having dedicated studios, you have smaller one-off production companies. These companies would then be funded VC style by funds that seek to mitigate their risk by diversifying their pool of movies. You could fund a few flops, so long as every now and again an Avatar comes along.

The line is blurring.

Zynga and Hollywood are much closer in terms of their provision of value to consumers than ebay and hollywood.

What I'm trying to say is, that VCs are getting closer to cannibalizing the entertainment investment business, online and iOS gaming is a good gateway drug.

>I think most of us (unfortunately) are still going to want to watch movies like Transformers 3 at a $200 million budget than a $1million dollar indie flick.

At some point special effects are going to peak and the 1 million dollar indie flick will look exactly like the 200 million dollar one.

There will still be other differences, but technology is going to go a long way towards leveling the playing field.

"Peak" in popularity or in terms of return on expenditure?

With cost reduction of special effects, I agree that the playing field will gradually level...

...but to contradict myself a bit, perhaps it won't ever level because new technologies will continue to be introduced to improve the entertainment experience that are proprietary and therefore expensive.

We have tech, cost of tech is going down. But you still need talent to operate the tech, and the best talent are not cheap. The workers have unions and the ones that are not part of union do this full time and want to support at the very least a middle class lifestyle. For a hollywood movie, you don't want to use just any crew. You want the best film crew, the best makeup, wardrobe, casting, post & pre production. All the above cost money, lots of money.

That's all true for now. But eventually you'll be able to throw some actors in front of a green screen and do everything--makeup, wardrobe, special effects in post production, with one guy.

Hell, when computers can generate photo real actors, actors will just be people in mocap suits (except that we won't need mocap suits by then), and they won't even need to be attractive. Eventually one person will be able to create the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Video games are there today -- computers and mocap rigs all the way down. Still they are approaching hollywood movies in terms of budget. Tangled and Avatar are some of the most expensive movies of all time.

There are no shortcuts to that level of polish. Doesn't matter how advanced your rendering is, you still need an army of 3D artists. Makeup isn't going to be much cheaper just because you do it in Maya.

Avatar and Tangled were both pioneers of new technology of course they were expensive, but there are amateur fan effects better than those from multi-million dollar movies and TV shows 15-20 years ago. And the games of 10-15 years ago can be made a couple of people on a shoestring budget. I expect that trend to continue.

>Makeup isn't going to be much cheaper just because you do it in Maya.

They won't use Maya. Technology progresses, and tools become easier to use. At some point in the future you'll be able to select an actor, click makeup and adjust some sliders.

>you still need an army of 3D artists

For original creations you do need artists (the tools will continue to improve and make each artist more efficient), but there will come a time when all you'll need to do is take a few photos of tree, or a building to make an ultra high quality 3d model of it.

But to take that photo you still need to find the perfect tree or building, then drag some cameras out and take pictures of it. Then once it's uploaded, set up light and do some manual adjusting because that branch is just a few degrees off. And that's just one tree or building, you need thousands for a movie.

Indie movies will upload their back yard or buy stock trees, and it will show. That's what separates big budget from small budget - perfectionism and meticulous attention to the tiniest details. Computers doesn't understand beauty or emotion, so you need fine grained human control every step of the way.

It's the composition that is expensive and not the ability to perfectly reproduce reality.

Entirely agree, if you watch any artist or musician work, the amount of attention paid to detail is astonishing.

It's the same as when a programmer will constantly re-factor their code to provide better abstractions or improve efficiency. Or when a designer spends hours deciding on how to a lay an interface out.

The tools to create generic copy-paste movies and music are already out there in the same way you can build a website by buying something from template monster and copy pasting a bunch of Javascript and PHP that you found on google around.

Of course tools will get better and make efficiency better but all that will do is raise the bar. People want to see movies that will wow them , either with better special effects than they have seen before or with clever/funny dialogue etc.

The people who have the skills to do this best will want to work for the big media companies because these are the ones who will open their wallets and pay them a good salary to do what they love all day with the best tools available.

>Computers doesn't understand beauty or emotion, so you need fine grained human control every step of the way.

That's were your wrong. Computers don't understand beauty, but given enough processing power, and sample data they can recreate it.

There's already a program that can listen to Beethoven and reproduce something that even experts can't tell he didn't write.

A movie example: In your movie creator you set up a scene with 2 people talking in a room. The computer has been trained with thousands of such scenes, so it automatically selects the best camera angles and allows the operator some manual control. That will happen at some point.

Does voice acting not require talent?

It does, but an actor can come in for a week and bang out an entire script if he's just voice acting.

Also there are computer generated singing voices good enough to fool Japanese audiences.

One guy will never have the talent to do it all at a top level. Even if there's incredible automation, there will still be choices to be made. The choices are of a diverse enough nature that specialization will still trump a jack of all trades.

I'm sure that most of the time it will require a small team instead of one guy.

But, I think you overestimate the quality of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Imagine if you put Steven Spielburg in front of a hypothetical movie machine. A machine that could automate everything down to the actors and voices, so all the director had to do was write the script, place everything, and direct all the action (yes I realize something like this is years away). I'd bet that he could produce a movie at least as good as the average summer blockbuster.

Indeed, film is not just all direction and writing, handed down from above, and the rest falls into place. Directors often work with the same groups of people on their team, and it's not just because of nepotism or working familiarity -- Christopher Doyle brings as much to each Wong Kar Wai film as the director himself; Bela Tarr leaves the music completely up to Mihaly Vig (an integral part of his movies).

Wasn't "Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow" filmed like this? I remember hearing that it was a difficult form of acting. Location shooting, or even sets, have side effects on the actors.

That's all true for now. But eventually you'll be able to throw some actors in front of a green screen and do everything--makeup, wardrobe, special effects in post production, with one guy.

There was an interesting interview with Ewan McGregor, where he described working on the Star Wars prequels as a total nightmare. He was in front of a green screen, sat on top of some wooden box (it was supposed to be an animal we was riding). As the box swayed from side to side, George Lucas yelled "Look at the moons!".

To which McGregor said "WHAT MOONS?". As an actor, he was so distanced from the scene that he was unable to perform to the best of his abilities. The output speaks for itself.

TL;DR: focusing solely on technology without thinking of the human factor is a bad idea.

You pretty much nailed it. YC don't understand entertainment, just like the entertainment industry refuse to understand web technology. Transformers is really an edge case, many hollywood films can be made for half of that[1]. Not your typical YC type of investment, but still doable by tech industry, after all we have tech startups like color getting 40 million for an app. The question is will the Tech industry be willing to make investment in an industry it really does not understand. Contrary to some misconception being a great entertainer does require some kind of discipline and experience like being hacker. It takes time, many entertainers start young and spend many hours working on their craft, just like hackers. The stereotypical drugs and alcohol abuse come after. Hollywood type talent is not something you can just whip up. An interesting note, Mark Susters is a tech VC investing in entertainment[2] to disrupt the market. But Mark is working on the low end of the scale, with very low budget productions (compared to hollywood) and average actors and directors. This too is not enough. If YC is seriously going to attempt to kill Hollywood it's going to have to take on risk it never did before. The entertainment crowd is much different from the tech crowd.

[1] The average cost as of 2008 is 106.6 million http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/06/business/fi-boxoffic... in 2009 MPAA, the organization compiling and reporting the figures stopped. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2009/0...

[2] http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/11/03/the-future-of-... In his presentation Mark Suster made some correct but to obvious observation, what I disagree is his take on talent, namely he thinks the cost of talent is going up. He's not completely wrong, in that the cost of mediocre talent has gone done, but talent that people want to see, the talent that can sell tickets and drive views, their pay is going up.

I think you missed a level of indirection: YC does not want to revolutionize entertainment. YC just wants to fund a company that would revolutionize entertainment. I imagine that YC is not exactly full of healthcare or education experts, but they are perfectly happy to fund companies working in those fields; this is the same.

That's the problem. We can't aim to make $200 M movies from the start.

But I think it is pretty much possible to build a platform where we can finance a TV series like The Big Bang Theory, by charging only $1 per episode to the subscriber. Just cutting the middle man and setting a deal with a dumb pipe channel like Google (YouTube), where they can make money from ads, and paying the creators some more money... That would be only $4 a month for a series you REALLY love. [1]

And of course, the public wins A LOT, by avoiding unexpected cancellations, time slot changes, etc!

I'd definitely pay for series like Battlestar Galactica, TBBT, MacGyver (lol! how would it be today)...

And of course, if you make it GLOBAL, erasing regional restrictions, you can increase your audience at an enormous level!

I see this model as something ABSOLUTELY plausible today. Why are we still paying to the middle men?!?! Let's make this happen.

[1] http://www.tvguide.com/News/Top-TV-Earners-1021717.aspx

Think in a disruptive way. Actors don't have to be paid $10 million. Special effects don't have to cost tens of millions. Equipment doesn't have to cost millions either.

Make the movies the way you would build a lean start-up. And bank on innovation in the movies and scripts, rather than recycling popular content and make it very flashy.

But as I mentioned in another comment, I think to kill Hollywood you need incubators like YCombinator to seed the initial team and script, and attract young talent, and then help them find investors who would put a few millions into the movie, and also build a platform for distribution, like a Youtube for these movies, and a good business model to monetize them.

Some kind of news/community sites would help too, not only to share information about the projects, but also get feedback and build a group of "early adopters" who will evangelize your movie later.

This could work, but how good is YCombinator at judging an initial team & script ? The investors YC knows and work with, invest primarily in tech not entertainment. Will the investors be willing to take risk in a different sector ? Not every great talent has a hit on his/her first or even second try.

The problem with movies is that even when the argument may seem very interesting at first, the realization can make it a disaster. That's what differentiates an awesome director from a bad one.

That's why I see hard to visualize crowd-financing to movies. The risk may be just too high.

What you describe is largely how things work right now.

Independent production companies, which represent the origin of most non-blockbuster films, work just like incubators now.

They have a development budget which they use to find and develop scripts in what might as well be an early seed round. They then shop this developed project around to financing sources, of which there are a great number that are not tied to studios. These financing sources may require additional development or even "pivoting" of the project.

Once financing is secured and the people providing the funding are happy, production can proceed. At this point, you're still wholly outside the studio system. You can completely finish your film outside the studios. This happens now, all the time, and it happens not just with Sundance style films, but with mainstream films with pretty substantial budgets.

Sundance, as an aside, is not just a festival, but also a market for these independent productions. Festivals such as Cannes and Toronto are much the same. You'll see a number of stories over the next week about films acquired at Sundance. What this means is that distribution deals were signed for films that were produced using means independent of the studios. The distributors are often, but not always, arms of the studios.

Someone mentioned Brad Pitt. He stars in independently financed projects all the time. In fact, he himself is often the indie producer, via his company Plan B which arranges for the financing through other entities.

The problem you have is that you might build a great movie startup and find some great young talent but sooner or later they are going to realise that they can make more money elsewhere once the big hollywood companies start waving their chequebooks around.

Make the movies the way you would build a lean start-up. And bank on innovation in the movies and scripts, rather than recycling popular content and make it very flashy.

Problem is that this is very high risk and the public are fickle, if your innovative idea does not take off then you have lost money. If it does take off then you will be very tempted to milk that one idea for as long as you can.

Honestly, what do you think YCombinator can bring to the table that isn't already there? How exactly do you propose to disrupt something you know nothing about? It's the equivalent of the head of the MPAA saying 'Fuck it, we'll build our own search engine'. I know the tech scene is full of very smart people, but guess what - the film industry is full of very smart people too!

The thing you have to understand is that smart, talented people are making films right now with innovative scripts and low budgets. And most of them will lose money, because nobody wants to see them. People genuinely prefer watching 'flashy' films with lots of VFX and actors who they've heard of.

Just because you want it to work differently doesn't mean it will.

"Honestly, what do you think YCombinator can bring to the table that isn't already there?"

The attitude that things are wrong with the industry, and it can/should be done better.

That's already there in droves: that's basically the mantra of every indie film director, iFilm, most film schools, alternative distributors and theaters, and just about everyone else connected to movies who isn't the big studios. They even have substantial seed funding for that kind of thing (much larger than YCombinator's typical seed funding) through a large number of directors, actors, grant agencies, universities, and rich film fans who regularly fund "not Hollywood" experimentation (sort of that industry's version of angel investors and incubators).

This is a somewhat misleading analysis, as the costs of Hollywood movies are not implicit relative to their production values.

Movies do not have a typical accounting structure and that impacts their budgeted "costs".

In a typical collaborative venture with some degree of risk one might expect for most of the principals (director, actors, etc.) to take most of their compensation in the form of profit sharing. However, this is untenable in Hollywood because the standard is to use a fucked up accounting structure which results in most movies showing no profit on paper. Instead, a small number of people end up taking home a percentage of the gross revenues of the movie and most of the earnings for everyone else are upfront in cash.

This has several negative effects. For one it makes any movie staring a big star very much more expensive because you have to pay them $x million out of pocket. Also, because it raises the budget floor for making a top tier feature film it forces the industry to take fewer perceived risks, because a financial loss would be more devastating.

But this is only Hollywood's poisonous culture, not a fundamental aspect for making films. A production company that was founded on firmer and more ethical financial ground could implement proper profit sharing for actors, directors, other creatives, and even effects houses. It would allow movies to operate on lower budgets and embrace higher risk projects.

The project has an objective find an alternative to Hollywood. But like everything else, baby steps are in order. I don't know why it is assumed that a beta solution should ship with the ability to produce "Avatar" caliber productions.

When it comes to technology, I'm optimistic that it has almost limitless potential to revolutionize. My instinct tells me though that a startup aimed at competing against Hollywood doesn't have to be about inventing alternate forms of entertainment, but rather to work at optimizing on alternate means of production and distribution of the already successful form of entertainment. Recent efforts with other media have shown that most optimizations are about cutting out as much unnecessary intermediary layers as possible.

I'm convinced that a number of people currently working within the Hollywoodian system are unhappy with the present arrangements and I would not be surprised if a few were to come out the woodwork because of this YC invitation. Their expertise will be essential, because if my guess is correct, I think that a large majority of people on HN are complete ignorami when it comes to making a movie or a tv show. We're more consumers and critics than we are creators or producers of such material.

Another thing would be to look at what currently exist that tries to spearhead such alternate efforts. Is it successful? What are the problems? What has been tried? Where's the data?

First, let's ask the people who currently work on the fringe of Hollywood how they're doing it.

Do you know what's involved in making high end mass-market entertainment as produced by Hollywood or the games industry? A massive amount of work by large groups of very talented, highly qualified, incredibly hard working people. You see, unlike most tech startups, making movies is a really big collaborative endeavour. As an example, let's consider post production/VFX.

VFX companies are external contractors to the studios and compete to bid on upcoming projects. Competition is tough and the studios are more than willing to go wherever they can to achieve the best price/quality ratio. Yet still VFX can amount to a significant fraction of the production budget for a modern blockbuster. The studios are happy to pay for this though since they know that VFX driven films generally do better than the alternative.

http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/

So if the VFX companies aren't making massive profits, what are their costs? The costs are employing hundreds of artists and developers to create content. And content is what people are ultimately paying money to see. It's exactly the same in the games industry.

So to create an alternative to Hollywood, you'd need to generate content that's as good as Hollywood. And you're not going to do that without lots of highly paid content creators. Doesn't seem like particularly low hanging fruit to me.

I am sort of surprised that pg chose movies rather than music. Movies are hard. You need a lot of things to make a movie. I liked Avatar. You can't do that kind of thing on the cheap. Actors, sites, makeup, lighting, special effects, etc. For music, you need the band, which are essentially founders from an equity standpoint, and own their own instruments already since they know how to play them. You need like $1000 of recording gear and some dude to hit the "record" button.

Eventually movies will be democratized, but killing the RIAA/iTunes cabal seems like the obvious first step.

This is true for some music genres, but not all. Same way you can just press record on your camera phone, you are unlikely to film the next blockbuster on that.

Commercial quality polish (generally) takes expensive engineers and expensive equipment, and a lot of time, and this is true of most multimedia fields, with exception of Indy sub genres.

A $1000 recording won't give you great sound quality, not 24/96 K. It easy to marginalize a recording engineer until you try to record an album yourself. To get the the sound you want there are number of things you want to get right, the right equipment, the right space, mic placement, recording levels. Still not as expensive or hard as making movie, but not so easy either.

This is true, I know some indie musicians and they usually own a minimum of $10,000 worth of equipment themselves and on top of that hire other stuff when they record or play live.

A lot of things that people think are "done in someone's garage" are either done by someone with very rich parents or produced by a relatively well funded company.

And, even if you get something recorded, mixed, and mastered by really talented independent professionals, the label will sometimes ask you for the stems (or even to re-record certain parts) so they can bring in "their guy" to put "their sound" on it.

Luckily with the labels fading as a distribution mechanism for independent music this is not happening as much anymore.

games used to cost a lot of money and used to be hard. now they cost nothing to make except your time, and you can do it in your garage.

let people have the opportunity to access the distribution channel, and they will figure the other problems out.

people in this community seem to think that they're the ones that are going to solve all the problems in an industry to move it forward.

colleges have access to expensive equipment - if students have access to quality distribution channels, they'll take time to produce high quality content.

my first company made software and hardware; we started in my dorm, used electronic equipment (scopes and power supplies and stuff), and build a product and company that made money. if I can do it with technology, someone else can do it with cameras, recording equipment.

music has itunes, software has app stores, artists/painters have the web, online retail has warehouses without floorspace (and in some cases, not even warehouses). there is absolutely no reason movies don't fit into the equation.

> games used to cost a lot of money and used to be hard. now they cost nothing to make except your time, and you can do it in your garage.

Let's not go overboard here. Just because there is a growing market for indie games like Minecraft does not mean big budget productions like CoD, WoW or Skyrim is at all feasible for a single person to design, code, test, and support from a garage.

Good games are still very hard to make. They dont have to cost a lot of money but if you want to make the next WoW, you better have a big budget.

you missed the point. the point is that the distribution model has changed and parties interested in participating has increased. this doesn't mean that the larger parties with deep pockets no longer participate. but if you are implying that competition has not increased and won't increase because making games, good or bad, costs less then you would be wrong.

the average game does cost less to make, because there are a lot more low-budget games out there.

the game changes when the distribution model changes.

Indie movies have itunes too. Still, just getting your game in the app store or your music or movie in itunes, doesn't mean it will sell well. Angry birds cost over $100,000[1] to make and those Modern Warfare games cost tens of millions of dollars market and produce. The big budget production typically dominate mind share in these markets.

[1] http://mobilewebgo.com/how-did-angry-birds-become-blockbuste...

Large games are still costing an enormous amount of money to make. Think in something like GTA 4, Skyrim, COD Series, WOW. Indie games have their market and can even become massive (Rovio?), but console and pc games in general are at a whole other level. I wish I could make Skyrim in my garage =) !! But that's not going to happen any time soon.

As you said, I think that there are platforms already here to distribute music. What we should start to put our focus on is in how to finance TV series, and eventually Movies (that are much more expensive).

iTunes isn't in a cabal with RIAA, Apple just needs to use the RIAA to make iTunes usable. Actually it's partly because of iTunes that RIAA is so vulnerable; iTunes cuts out the marketing and distribution part of the business.

Or how about a way to fix the congress and the election process? A startup to provide information on the promises kept/broken, campaign financing, how much someone is influenced by lobbyists etc, so that only people who can be trusted get to vote on these issues. I think having politicians who can be trusted, who are informed, is more important. The recent blackouts swayed so many of them, but we can't do this every time. Some dashboard kind of thing, to let them know what their constituents want would be very useful for them, since I'm afraid they dont read opinion polls...

It is so very true that financing is the real issue here. http://rootstrikers.org/

Definitely. Either fix financing or join in. The reason why Hollywood is so powerful is because they actually donate to campaigns and have lobbyists.

That seems far more productive than trying to destroy an industry because you're tired of their political power.

It's important to remember you can do both at the same time. Work hard towards financial reform, but in the mean time flex your financial muscles to get there otherwise you will be defenseless and the reform you seek will never happen.

Am I the only one who believes that this notion of 'piracy stealing jobs' is simply a catalyst for Rupert Murdoch and his billionaire friends who collectively own this industry to personally control the Internet? This is absolutely a power struggle. They want to control our information, like they always have--look at Fox news.

As more and more people switch to online sources of entertainment, their industry is simply being diluted by Youtube's, Hulu's, Reddit, HackerNews and the Apple App Store.

So in their dying breaths, they are spending $100 million a year trying to take control of the very industry that is diluting their power over our information and their control of our minds. It sounds very George Orwellian, but I mean really.. have you seen Fox news? It's a parody of itself.

Rupert Murdoch tried his best to have a go at the online industry with Myspace and we all know how well that turned out for him, so I guess the self-professed billionaire tyrant figures if he can't beat them, why not just try and own them?

It's ironic Hollywood itself WAS a group of rogue startups, just over 100 years ago.

But here's the thing - you can probably make a dent but "killing it" ?

Wouldn't that be like making professional sports obsolete?

There is just too much money and organization and you are never going to get all the fans to try something else instead and stay with it.

Relevant- Hollywood tries new online network for connecting established filmmakers with investors.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/risky-business/sundance-201...

If you want to get rid of Hollywood, there is only one way to do it...

Start funding shows, movies, and productions.

Or figure out how to get 100MM people (or more) subscribed at $10/month (or more) to check-mark which shows and movies they want created. Then use the revenue from that to make the production.

Maybe even make the process completely democratic, where actors (known, and unknown) can send in their auditions and you get to vote on it. Then use YouTube or NetFlix for distribution, and provide downloads.

There is more to it than the above, but that pretty much cuts the studios off, and Hollywood in general, at the knees, and gives control to the consumers.

So back to the beginning of the loop... One has to pay for content.

How's that a problem?

I don't think it is. I guess the problem that should be tackled is not how the movies & music are actually done, but rather the way they are sold. The problem in my view - without pointing at anyone - is that not enough people are willing to pay for the products.

Does getting rid of our Old Entertainment Overlords really matter, if our New Entertainment Overlords are going to be doing the same thing? As long as one group of people is getting rich in an industry, the temptation is always there to start rigging the rules in your favor by working the refs. Look at the current mess we have with patents. Disrupting Hollywood is great, but we should also innovate by coming up with new ways to discourage and punish companies from attempting things like SOPA.

Yes, it does matter, because whatever replaces Hollywood will 1) let me consume better entertainment products in ways I prefer, and 2) not require legislation to remain viable. I have no problem with whatever and whomever eventually disrupts Hollywood getting rich off me buying their stuff.

I agree that lobbying power for industries like Hollywood is a problem that needs to be fixed, but that is a much larger context than entertainment. We can both replace Hollywood with a more consumer oriented industry and reform lobbying, but they are two separate goals.

“Such ridiculous, destructive bills should never even pass committee review,” Mr. Arment wrote. The real problem, he added, is “the MPAA’s buying power in Congress,”

The real problem is that money has buying power in Congress. Money shouldn't buy votes. I don't know what the solution is but I'm fairly sure that's the problem.

Woa, that went huge fast. I mean, every startups is an offensive against something already existing, no? Yes, you can have an original idea but more often than not, it's based on something existing and enhancing it in some ways.

I don't believe we can blame the politicians for campaign finance corruption. It is our own complacency that has allowed this system to take a firm root in our government. How can you blame or get mad at one of our representatives for playing the game we make/allow them to play. I guess what I am saying is if you can't get elected unless you use the corrupt campaign financing system that we allow to be in place how can we be upset when our elected officials are a pawn to the system?

Same here. Campaign finance reform is a great idea but is not going to happen overnight. As long as it is not abolished the existing system has to be used to one's advantage. And as long Hollywood lobbyists outnumber Tech lobbyists it is going to be an uphill battle. I hope this recent conflict motivated big tech companies to increase their involvement in the policy process.

How much money do indy film makers need for a minimum viable product? How can we help them bring it to an audience and make money?

There is already lots of Indy product. Distribution and audience seem to be the hard bits. If you can make money, the product will come, people want to make this stuff...

Generally much more than YC hands out. Keep in mind that filmmaking has lots of equipment and other costs, whereas you can do a software startup just with a computer, lots of time, and some place to park yourself.

Bookmark this article and remember this date, as YCombinator has altered its focus and embarked on this political venture. Once it had worked hard to stay clear of political entanglements, now it dives wholeheartedly into the grift of politics. No one play politics and plays clean, not even angel investors.

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

Engineers love to solve problems. Hollywood has become a problem.

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