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Ask PG: What progress is being made on disrupting Hollywood?

11 points by Peroni ↗ HN
A few months back there was a post by PG calling on developers and entrepreneurs to disrupt Hollywood.[1]

It gained a massive amount of attention at the time and I'm curious as to whether anyone has heeded that call and if there is now any particular start-up or tech in the pipeline that may have a noticeable impact on that particular industry?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3491542

9 comments

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J3L2404
I believe it was 'Kill Hollywood'. You might as well have Henry Ford saying 'Kill Horses'. When a viable alternative exists it will gradually replace Hollywood. Just like every other industry.
pcote
In order for the auto industry analogy to hold, horse breeders would have had to have been actively interfering with early automotive innovation. Did that actually happen? (honest question)
J3L2404
Stopping piracy is not interfering with innovation, it is enforcing the law. Unfortunately the defense of piracy is based on it being trivial to copy. Lots of things are trivial to copy, like your private data. Surely you don't believe everyone should have access to your data just because it is easy to copy.
Peroni
Surely you don't believe everyone should have access to your data just because it is easy to copy.

Straw man fallacy. They aren't analogous.

Unfortunately the defense of piracy is based on it being trivial to copy

That's a pretty sweeping statement. Want to provide some citations?

shoham
Yeah, I agree -- it's important to respect copyright, even if you don't like it -- Do The Right Thing!
lastorset
I think there is still a long future for non-interactive/low-interactivity media. The original RFS acknowledged this. One project that aims to enable high-quality packaging independently of Hollywood is Lib-Ray [1]. Only a small part of the answer, but useful in its own right.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2144275086/lib-ray-non-d... (I don't know how much future there is in distributing physical media, but packaging menus and other stuff that non-hackers like in a standard format is possibly interesting.)

wj
I'm working on something to lower a portion of cost and difficulty on the production side. It is not going to kill Hollywood but hopefully it will help low-budget and student filmmakers.

I think killing Hollywood (breaking the stranglehold on distribution) is a long term goal. It will be a lot of smaller innovations that will enable it.

shoham
Check out FeedForward: http://www.feed-forward.net we're doing a lot namely giving artists incentive to communicate better with our core application which gives artists more exposure when they give feedback for others' work. We also feature a commission free market --sell your work with nothing more than a PayPal account, and we'll NEVER take a cut. We've applied for YC several times, and have never heard back, accept for their generic rejection letter, but we've been at this for years, not months, and I am a musician, so I understand just how hard it is for others like me, and I'm going for community development over riches and fame... Thanks!