New Court Evidence Reveals Hollywood’s Plan to Smear Google
wired.comIf I were google I would choose a big upcoming multi billion Hollywood film. And just return empty pages while the marketing campaign is roaring. For the star/cast/everything.
I would call it piracy prevention program - that way no one will be able to find piracy content trough google.
I assume this is a joke. This would be terrifying. The MPAA are trying to stop google from fairly distributing pages they disagree with. Google is net neutrality and should act as a dumb pipe utility in the sense that it returns the most relevant info based on your search.
If google returned empty pages for something it didn't agree with, the implications would be appalling.
Google should do during the spectrum wars when they bid on spectrum and territory to leverage telecom co.s. They should threaten to back netflix or start a studio to make movies and content. They already have distribution and funds.
I agree Google should return the best response to your search and not cut things out for bargaining points, but "dumb pipe utility" is incredibly off.
Google deliberately decided to downgrade the torrent sites ... so they lost all pretense at neutrality.
Or boost the rankings of originals over remakes.
That is an amazing idea. Sometimes the original is as good as it's gonna get.
That said, aren't both usually owned by the same studio/company?
Or Youtube. That must be the only place people will watch a trailer without the studio paying anything. In fact, maybe they even make money from the views.
I once had to watch a trailer for a different movie in order to watch the trailer I wanted to watch. I think most people posting trailers disable ads, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
That would be lovely, however that probably won't happen. Seeing google might get sued for that.
Why? They are a private company, they can do whatever they want on their site (also known as the iOS censorship apologist argument)
They make up a big enough proportion of the search market that whether or not they'd ultimately prevail, a move like that would tie them up in anti-trust battles for the next decade.
They can choose to not deliver "enhanced" search results -- showtimes, links to buy tickets, links to IMDB/RT/etc., that appear outside of the "native" search results.
As long as they don't mess around with the native search results, they'll be safer from an anti-trust perspective.
Doesn't matter - it'd still be "trivial" to put together a sufficiently complicated case to have it survive dismissal attempts and drag it out for years.
The point is they're not just at risk of losing an anti-trust battle, but simply of having their execs embroiled in it for years.
But search is only metadata. Metadata is not important ...
Because they very much have to toe the line of being "neutral" in their search results as to not enable all the sanctions/remedies that other search engine competitors (like Bing) to have merit. Were they to overtly use their position to "punish" the content companies in this way, they would be jumped on by regulators everywhere for abusing a monopoly power.
Torrent sites downgrade, as searching for torrents were exactly that. Punishing arbitrary sites for no good reason.
The sad reality is that torrent sites don't have large legal teams nor the public favor to win over judges and juries. In the mind of the public and lawmakers, they are punishing the "bad people". Any search provider will be able to continue this practice with impunity as long as they don't target people with real money.
I think it would be possibly anti-competitive.
However, Google already attempts to reward original content so if they could do it algorithmically to everyone (hence not disrupting the competitive marketplace) I think they'd be able to claim "oops."
They could just choose to reward rankings to the original movie, which means Hollywood will have to make movies that are not just reboots or sequels.
Until someone subpoenas their emails and sees a discussion in which the act is deliberate, during which case it's anti-competitive.
"Oops" only works when there's no proof, and it's hard to hvae an absence of proof in something that would take so much orchestration.
The real reason is that they fight very hard to seem like a neutral search agency. They wouldn't want to jepordise that for a squabble with hollywood.
They can and should be able to, but ever so often a government starts thinking that "oh, it's big enough that we should remind it we're bigger and claim it's a 'utility' or something". This kind of thing makes that argument easier.
They won't do that, they aren't MPAA, Comcast, NewsCorp or Hollywood ;-)
They are actually a public company as you can buy stock in them.
They are a monopoly. iOS is not.
Why is this modded down? Apple fans don't like swipes at Apple?
while i can this form an emotional point of view I would call this highly unprofessional.
nevertheless hollywood does everything to abolish itself producing only comic/computer game adaptions or se-/prequels.
Yeah, I assume everyone is joking or something. Do we really want google to set such a precedent? Killing pages of things they or their affiliates dislike. Scary.
This was a joke ... kinda. But since MPAA asked google to downgrade into oblivion some results. And got it without court order, this means that downgrading all results for a movie for "just because" is pretty fine too.
They won't need to. They are bigger than Hollywood in a few important ways.
I would call it "the best opportunity Bing will ever get"
Is TV no longer a dominant channel for big budget film marketing?
Hollywood is an industry that should be very vulnerable to disruption. Even if we ignore the whole digital distribution aspect, there's so much bloat in the overhead cost of producing a film. Everything about the industry is based around croneyism, various inside deals made between established independent contractors on short term contracts with all sorts of padding. Plus overhead for safety & insurance, lots of manual union labor w/ exhausting overtime hours that cost $$, and big egos demanding everything under the sun.
The thing is that when the level of CGI realism gets to the point that most blockbuster movies don't really need to shoot on location at all, there's no need for Hollywood production anymore. The Pixar office campus model starts to become the norm. You can produce movies from anywhere you can fit a server rack. The only films that will need Hollywood will be the ones that wouldn't work as CG - comedies, documentaries and dramas which don't make much money and will need to get cheaper and cheaper to be viable.
Basically Hollywood as we know it will collapse eventually. The companies that will win at the filmmaking game are the ones with their fingers in digital distribution, a global marketing apparatus, cheap compute resources, and cheaper human talent. AKA Google / YouTube. So the MPAA needs to knock out Google for any hope of survival. Tactics like this will only accelerate the process. So Google wins.
Having made films for quite some time, aiming to outdo Hollywood rather than work within it - there's a lot less bloat than it may initially appear, and they're better at this stuff than they look from the outside.
Films are hugely labour-intensive, particularly to produce to the standards that the public demand. There are a variety of interesting avenues to pursue if you are interested in disrupting Hollywood - I blog about many of them when I'm not actively pursuing them - but none of them are trivial.
As for CGI realism: ish. I actually moved away from CGI to live-action quite recently, after nearly 20 years of making low-budget animated movies, because IMO live-action is actually far more promising right now. CGI is extremely useful as a backup and emabler in conjunction with live-action, but not so much on its own. I wrote more about that here - http://www.strangecompany.org/why-the-guy-who-coined-machini... .
Your point about "shooting on location" versus CGI seem absurd to me. A Hollywood production is so much more that just the logistics to shoot on location. It is actors, directors, casting, production design, production management, music, manuscripts, editing etc. All of these things requires a specialized skillset. None of these can be replaces with a server rack. Animation is somewhat different production-wise, but still need the same kind of talent, just not as many trucks.
Hollywood accounting is infamous, but it seems Hollywood actually know what they are doing business-wise. They pay stars a lot of money because it translates into ticket sales, not because they are idiots.
Many movies are made outside of Hollywood (so-called independent movies) with cheaper talent (sometimes working for free), but only rarely are they as financially successful as Hollywood movies.
"Many movies are made outside of Hollywood (so-called independent movies) with cheaper talent (sometimes working for free), but only rarely are they as financially successful as Hollywood movies."
There are one or two individual producers who crack the code to making movies that are financially successful AND outside the Hollywood model, but they're rare.
Right now, Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Insidious) and Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Safety Not Guaranteed, Creep) are the two names to watch in the indie-but-also-profitable space.
Those roles can be outsourced offshore to cheaper labor markets or handed to cheaper (aka non-union) domestic talent markets, which is what I was hinting at. Wasn't really implying that computers can replace creatives. Basically the argument is when you level the geographic playing field, quality creative talent is a cheaper commodity.
Lots of movies (and especially TV) are made on the cheap outside of Hollywood and around the world. There still seem to be a significant demand for Hollywood-style grand productions and movie stars.
I've thought about this a lot - I work in mediatech and have also thought about PG's RFS when it was posted some years ago.
Ultimately, I've come to the conclusion that thinking about Hollywood as "production & distribution" is naive - if that were really the case YouTube and Netflix would have long replaced Hollywood by now. And I don't think "CGI" realism will disrupt them either.
What Hollywood has, to an overwhelming degree, and which is really hard to "automate" is talent. From writers, singers and to actors and directors, Hollywood is really effective at finding and growing talent and the rest of the world hasn't really figured out how to write great content other than "throw millions of dollars at it" (like Netflix with House of Cards).
Simply put, you can have the best distribution channels or the cheapest platform but the top tier talent is expensive - but also has the best returns. And couple that with the fact that media production is very hit or miss (you can spend 150MM on a movie and have no one watch it, or make 1B), you are faced with something you can seemingly only "disrupt" by spending as much as everyone else.
No need to shoot on location? This is how it was done in the studio system from the early days through about the 1970s. The studios were more dominant then.
I agree some aspects of film are ripe for disruption but many aspects have already been disrupted multiple times over the years.
I'm in the medical industry, which is another field that tech newbies think will be fixed real soon now as hackers turn their attention to it. In both cases there is a lot of hard earned insider knowledge that outsiders (arrogantly) discount.
Rarely to random people say: "Hey, that looks like a good industry to disrupt!" It usually comes from the people that actually work in the industry and have experienced the inefficiencies first-hand. They then work with outsiders to actually implement solutions.
I work in med-tech on the tech side. Every CEO of the small companies I deal with have 15+ years in medicine. Almost all of them have experience in both the practitioner and administrator roles. From my experience, these arrogant outsiders you speak of either don't exist or make such an insignificant impact that you'd have to put effort into actually finding them.
I agree they tend to have insignificant impact but they definitely exist and try. Look for a late 1990s article (I think it was in Wired, maybe rolling stone) about the founding of Healtheon. In it James Clark (My memory anyway) explains that healthcare IT sucks because only dipshits have worked on it so far. Now that a genius like him was getting into, everything would be great.
The opinion that I wrote here was formulated several years ago after a long conversation with an accountant I met on the set of a major film, who was sent by the studio to audit the production. The inefficiencies and borderline corrupt nature of hollywood's film production spending habits are mind blowing. I would get into detail but it’s a bit long of a yarn for a HN comment.
Healthcare has some systemic similarities I suppose, but the case I'll make is that there's a historic precedent for digital disruption of creative media with books, increasingly TV, and particularly music. We think of online piracy as the main disruptor of the record business, but the record industry also lost a lot of power when artists no longer needed a major label's advance check or marketing to record & distribute a successful album. Advances in home recording technology and social media are decentralizing the music business, and if similar leaps come along in filmmaking tech it isn't a stretch to guess it would decentralize the film industry in a similar fashion
The technology is already there to create movies and and distribute them digitally. You could probably, as an outsider, even send your movie to a theater as long as they have digital projection. A talented, hardworking team of outsiders could produce a variety of films just as good as anything out of hollywood. But that remains rare. I believe the bottleneck is talent and experience. There is no market for a competent movie. Even what you would consider a bad hollywood movie is a top 1% kind of thing. Consider the similar field of music. Lot's of people play music. But if you were given the choice between listening to a good local band and a top world famous band, almost everyone chooses the latter. This is partially the result of technology especially distribution technology. Our media appetites are so set to expect the best of the best that 90% of the best of the best seems mediocre to us. That is the problem you need to solve to disrupt the movie business.
PG has posted on this topic a few times, in fact.
http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bet/2014/02/netfl...
http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#hollywood
Yes, they're ripe for it. The consumers are ready for it, too. More power to those who pursue it!
Hollywood does have a very important role that isn't subject to disruption by technology. Hollywood is the home of the "star" system. Stars sell movies these days. Be them writers, directors, models, or guys with funny voices, the market want to see famous people on screen.
Whether it is Paris Hilton or Bill Maher, stars are the people who rise to the top of the system and become household names. The various media wings need a place with a critical mass of famous people. That happens in LA, and to a lesser extent in New York. Look at Vancouver. Lots of films, lots of money, but none of the media associated with LA's star system. The physicality of this system means it is resistant to disruption by technology. Hollywood will be king for a long time.
You could say the same about television. I don't buy it. I don't see us all watching cartoons only in the future.
Whadda ya mean "in the future"?
After documentaries on Netflix and Hulu, cartoons are already all that I watch, except maybe local news.
I learned recently that one the big reasons why Hollywood because synonymous with movies (besides the weather) was movie studios moving west to avoid Thomas Edison's ability to enforce his patents on the east coast.
I thought that was poetically ironic.
My question is how much damage to society will Hollywood do before collapsing? Putting a "Strong IP Enforcement" regime in place could cripple the USA for decades, for example.
Nope.
I'm actually wondering how illegal this is? This is trying to influence the stock market and attacking 1 company without "legal" jurification. They are trying to hurt Google's through stock, this IS actually the same as stealing/taking away a billion $ (stockvalue) ... (that should be illegal, isn't it?)
They obviously failed before execution, but that shouldn't matter...
Does anyone know if Google can use this information in court for a lawsuit against MPAA?
Why isn't the AG being indicted by the DOJ for this garbage? That is what I want to know. This is the kind of thing that should put someone behind bars and end a political career. Hood has obviously let his power go to his head. The MPAA is a well documented piece of garbage, but the Hood revelation is really where things get scary.
How does he justify being the MPAA's attack dog? Is there a significant movie industry in Mississippi that I am unaware of? If I lived in MS, I'd be pissed and demand answers from this guy. Using tax payer money with no benefit to his state.
Most likely local film production was dangled in front of them. Hollywood is masterful at extracting concessions from distant bumpkins who can't resist the siren song of "as seen on TV" glamor.
>this IS actually the same as stealing/taking away a billion $ (stockvalue)
Although it will probably go precisely nowhere, this is an interesting point. This sort of attack goes beyond a "character" attack on the company. Indeed, Google isn't directly affected by a drop in stock price; but as a Google shareholder, I am.
How is that fair or remotely acceptable? I suppose that's the purpose, and it's despicable. Once the political support for the MPAA ends, they'll have nothing left.
Perhaps it is acceptable for the same way legal character attacks on individuals are acceptable. If you spread true and public information that results in financial harm for a person such as causing the loss of their job, are you responsible for the damages?
Say that you were once charged with some awful crime. I mean really really bad crime. A little later the police noticed it was actually forgotsusername who they were after, and you were let go and even given a public statement that it wasn't you. But say I pulled up the records of you originally being charged and put them up on a billboard. Let's say I even showed the part where you were let go. But the crime is so horrible, and some people are so jumpy and so strongly believe in the 'where there is smoke there must be fire' line of thinking that your employer decides you are just too much of a liability. Would you have a case against me?
(Granted this might depend purely upon local laws where you live, so maybe the question should be: should you have a case against me?)
Does anyone know if Google can use this information in court for a lawsuit against MPAA?
Yes. According to the article it's in a court filing. I presume for the following lawsuit:
http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_jimhood_dec...
I once knew a guy who was sent to jail for insider trading in the 80's for manipulating stocks as a WSJ writer. It was a big deal at the time.
Publishing an editorial in the WSJ with the intention of manipulating a company's stock price certainly feels like it should fall under the same category..
It is probably covered by defamation of character law (it would be in the UK at least) or by malicious litigation law.
Despite Tony Blair pushing through changes to allow corporate bodies to use defamation laws, it's still pretty rare and an uphill struggle. The McLibel case showed how dangerous it is for a company to resort to that sort of litigation.
They spent millions, had an array of hilarious 'mom & apple pie' witnesses flown in from the US and managed to lose on many points (but not all) and were left with a useless judgment which they can never collect on as they were stupid enough to sue two people with no assets or any prospect of having any.
They did however, become a laughing stock in the legal world and have an array of TV programs and plays, mocking them mercilessly. Plus some of the, till then, unproven, claims of disgusting practice ended up being proven and therefore repeatable without risk - which was not the case beforehand.
Defamation actions are never a good way to go. Even winning one does not generally help you much.
I thought that companies were legal persons in English law? And if they can prove actual damages then they can sue for libel? As always IANAL
I'd agree that McLibel didn't play out that well for them - however here we're talking one massive company vs another. McLibel was not even close to the same thing as e.g. Google vs. the MPAA would be.
Anyway my main point was laws already exist to protect companies from malicious communications.
Hollywood is not in the UK. In the US, true statements are not defamation. There is plenty of damage Hollywood could do to Google purely by telling the truth.
Well in the UK true statements are not defamation either (as of a change in legislation last year).
My point is more that if Hollywood were lying about Google then Google would have legal recourse. If they are not then Google will just have to suck it up.
The MPAA is not "Hollywood" and had not been so for a long time.
MPAA current members: Sony, Disney, Fox, Universal, Warner and Paramount.
Netflix is not a member. Lionsgate is not a member. You tube is certainly not a member. The MPAA therefore doesn't represent the content industry let alone all of Hollywood. Those writing about the MPAA (Wired) should not take its word as representative of anyone other than its FIVE backers. And some of those (Sony) aren't exactly happy with them these days.
Uh... Under whose definition are Netflix or Youtube (Google) part of "Hollywood"? The term has always been used to refer to the industry formed by the big traditional studios which were founded in the early part of the century in the Hollywood/Burbank area. Lionsgate might qualify (and I don't know why they aren't in the MPAA), but then they haven't even been around for two decades yet.
The MPAA is "Hollywood" for sure, inasmuch as that term has any meaning at all. I simply don't understand what point you're trying to make.
I'd say that Hollywood is the north-American content industry focused around Hollywood California, but including New York, Vancouver and anywhere else where movies and TV is produced. Netflix is a major content producer who uses the same people as the MPAA backers. Youtube doesn't produce content in the same way, but they are very influential having stolen things like Music Videos from the likes of MTV. These non-MPAA entities compete in the same space but have very different opinions than those who support the MPAA.
My point is that the MPAA does not represent these other "Hollywood" content producers and shouldn't be described a representing any content producers beyond the five members.
Some advice on argumentation: don't make a point by subverting well-established jargon unless you're really explicit about it. You just confuse everyone involved.
I actually don't disagree with your point exactly (though it's a little spun: original content on Netflix and Youtube represents a tiny, tiny fraction of the eyeball-minutes of the movie industry -- it might get there some day but it's not remotely there yet). But what you were trying to say was completely obscured by your insane-seeming attempt to say that the MPAA doesn't represent the interests of "Hollywood".
I would not mind if the entire entertainment industry just die. Some (likely, the only worthy) part of it will adapt, and the rest is totally worthless.
The MPAA just might have picked on the wrong kid this time.
How so?
Because the MPAA is often the larger entity in court, and with leverage (copyright law). They have a long, litigious history from DMCA takedowns & expansion to SOPA. They don't mind suing individuals, wholesale [1].
In this particular case it's pretty clear the MPAA and the AG were both out of bounds. Why would the AG, the top lawyer for the state government (and supposedly for the people), need to help the MPAA with a smear campaign? According to Google, AG Hood's office supplied a proposal to the MPAA [2] with an editorial suggesting slumping stock prices, media segments in collaboration with the AG, regulatory lawsuits...
This is a conscious, targeted attack against Google because Hollywood didn't get its way. The project was even codenamed "Project Goliath" (related to the MPAA & affiliates, not the AG) [3].
Google has the resources, capability and will to vigorously defend itself where others may have not.
[1] https://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/MPAA_v_ThePeople/ [2] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2179... [3] http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/12/7382287/project-goliath
> editorial suggesting slumping stock prices
Is this not fraudulent?
It would be, except that the proposal wasn't that the editorial would say the Google stock price is slumping.
The proposal was actually for an editorial in the WSJ emphasizing that Google’s stock will lose value in the face of a sustained attack by AGs
Since it is an editorial, one can pretty easily make the case that a sustained attack on a company by the AGs will have a negative effect on that companies stock price.
I don't like it, but if there is a legal challenge here it won't be on those grounds.
It'd be very nice if the SEC jumped in.
US financial regulators usually have to be shoved in.
Yeah, of course it is. That is the point.
The reason I doubted is because Google are using the "MPAA is targeting us" attack (subjective at best) instead of taking them to the cleaners with stock market manipulation (written law with precedent). This means that I must be missing something and possibly there is a subtle reason why this isn't stock market manipulation.
At least the article makes it sound like the stock manipulation is ancillary to Google's offense.
The one thing I can think of is that the manipulation seems not to be focused on gaining money directly by the stock market manipulation. That should still be illegal, but it makes the case a bit less clear cut.
Secondly, that seems to be a plan and not something that was actually done. Still illegal, but nothing where they could say "they harmed us, they have to pay us".
The other aspect might be that a separate legal win is not what Google is after with that specific document. It is already part of a court proceeding and shall help Google counter the subpoena and further actions against Google by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, if I get the context right. To destroy those actions (and that man's career) would be a huge win for Google, going after specific individuals for stock price manipulation not. If I understand that right, that is something the state would have to do on its own anyway, in a normal criminal investigation, which would have to start now automatically.
Thanks, it makes significantly more sense now.
I think part of the reason they're not pushing the stock price manipulation is that it would be very difficult to overcome a prosecutor's absolute immunity.
because that's easy to move to them. want more gray area on stock manipulation when you give answers to "will Sony stock rise this month"?
It's probably not too wise to pick on the kids that made it and are swimming in money and power. It'll be The Revenge of the Nerds all over again.
Not to mention Google is by now a pretty deft political player.
Specific to the US, who do you think people will side with? Movie stars or Google Lawyers?
I don't see this as being slam-dunk for either side.
The MPAA/RIAA are not "The Movie Stars" they are "The Movie Studios." It's not even that. The MPAA is an industry lobbying group that the studios are members of. There is no big name movie star that is the "face" of the MPAA.
Clearly MPAA aren't "Move Stars" but in this case, the MPAA interests are more clearly aligned with today's celebrities, then they are with Google.
It's a stretch, but one could imagine google's competitors piling on as well.
lobbying group that can order new presidential mandates and for Angelina Jolie to adopt a dozen new kids.
you have no idea how PR works...
I do know how PR works. I also know that the MPAA's sister organization's fight against music piracy had some big name stars from their industry side with them (e.g. Lars Ulrich), but at the same time many big name artists (Trent Reznor, Radiohead, etc) did not side with them.
If the MPAA tries to put a "face" on this by pulling in celebrities, that could equally backfire if other celebrities come out against it.
> for Angelina Jolie to adopt a dozen new kids
So the MPAA tells Angelina Jolie how many kids to adopt now? Did the order come directly from the Illuminati or The Bilderberg Group?
Who will they side with? Google or the people who keep killing their favourite movie streaming and Torrent sites?
I expect the US population that cares about torrents is practially nil, though that is based personal bias.
If that population is practically nil, then what's the problem with torrents/pirating?
Nobody doing it: no loss to the studios.
Even without knowing exactly, precisely how many people int he USA are torrenting and pirating, the studios seem to think it's a Great Big Deal, and are willing to splash out a lot of cash, and a lot of good will to get torrenting stopped. That would seem to indicate that the US population that cares about torrents is actually pretty large.
Which side, people bringing entertainment to them or the ones destroying any private life they have left?
People bringing entertainment to them or the ones who don't hesitate to literally destroy someone's life over a bunch of copied pop songs or movies?
Truth be told, it really depends on which side has more control over the narrative in the media.
Uhhhh... I think the MPAA's popularity has basically been zero since the whole napster thing.
Must be an unsigned value.
People will side with MPAA or RIAA?
The MPAA isn't made up of movie stars.
So, will people side with Google Lawyers, or Notoriously-Shady-Film-Studio Lawyers?
Remember when the US sued ibm for 30 years and lost? Pretty much the same reason.
Maybe Google should do product placement in movies like Apple does: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-product-placements-in-t...
* Apple's marketing chief, Phil Schiller, said that "One of Apple's employees works closely with Hollywood on so-called product placement so its gadgets are used in movies and television shows.
They've done product placement and they've also done something that Apple never has - they got an entire movie about just their company. It's called The Internship.
I wonder if the threat of continuous attack and litigation could hurt shareholders of the MPAA's partners more than Google itself. Particularly since the last decade of investment into anti-piracy campaigns and measures has not curved piracy.
Hollywood is slowly decaying into irrelevance. This is a sign that they know their days are numbered. People are not going stop pirating, hell the whining and draconian measures to get people to stop pirating their movies makes me want to pirate the shit out of it even more.
Plenty of video services like netflix, amazon prime are producing their own quality tv shows that exceed most of the crap movies we get. Everything is CG or some dumb plotline about sex. I'm sure films & tv shows will turn out from tech giants. I think if Google jumped in and began paying celebrities to star in their movies it could do well. I've always thought Hollywood to be a propaganda machine.
What? This is bullshit. Where does the most popular television abd film content come from? Hollywood - including the Netflix only stuff.
By Hollywood, people here mean the big studios/distributors, that is, the companies who provide the cash, not the production companies that film the stuff.
Through a system of billing specifically set up to make the production company end up deep in the red while the big "studio" rakes in the profits. AKA Hollywood accounting.
The system is rotten to the core, and copyright as a concept has been broken since the day someone could drop a couple of 100s on the table and walk out the door with the digital equivalent of a printing press.
Copyright basically hinges on the act of copying being a laborious process, involving large machinery and man-hours.
This because such requirements make all acts of copying for profit activities, to recoup the costs of the copying.
But when producing one additional copy is a case of ctrl-c ctrl-v, calculating the cost heads into "angels on the head of a pin" territory.
Copyright died the year that xerox machines got installed in public and college libraries. Everything since then has been attempts to unring a bell, and maybe stuff a genie back into a lamp.
So, iow, Hollywood.
People forget or don't know that Hollywood is the Silicon Valley of films. You need a special effect? There's a guy down the street who can do that. You need a special lens or lighting? You can rent that, today, for a hundred bucks at the shop around the corner.
That's why films, and the people who make them, congregate in Hollywood.
The guy down the street is not a big studio/distributor providing the cash. As I said, people aren't talking about Hollywood-the-place. It's a metonym, like "Wall Street" and "Fleet Street", and in this case it's specifically about a few companies (mainly the MPAA members).
> Where does the most popular television [and] film content come from?
Elstree.
Can we consider Game of Thrones to be the most popular tv show currently?
From the wiki: >Filmed in a Belfast studio and on location elsewhere in Northern Ireland, Croatia, Iceland, Morocco, Spain, Malta, Scotland, and the United States,
So it does not come from Hollywood. HBO is owned by Time Werner, but operate independently. So neither the physical production place nor the company that made it screams hollywood.
As for the Netflix only stuff, it is owned by Netflix.
Filmed on location doesn't mean not from Hollywood. Hollywood isn't just the actual physical sets in LA, it's the entire industry.
HoC, GoT, all come from Hollywood. Heck, even GRRM was a screenwriter for Hollywood. The creators of GoT are also from Hollywood (Troy, Kite Runner, the awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine, etc.) and the show is run by Warner-owned HBO.
the hobbit was filmed on new Zealand... by Hollywood. who gave NZ a new thematic airport (it's like entering the shire) and in exchange for the airport and the movie production taxes got the head of kim dotcom on a tray.
The threat to Hollywood goes deeper than piracy. Within a few years, video games will be generating photo-realistic feature films on demand, with unique scripts and characters and worlds adapted to the viewer's tastes and mood. Game/movie publishers won't have to worry as much about piracy because they will be selling the service, not the content. (But upload your personalized movie to YouTube and they can monetize that, too.)
I may possibly be the best person in the world to comment on this particular statement. Given that: no, this isn't going to happen in the near future.
"Films on demand" - some aspects of this are near-future plausible given existing script, mocap and voice acting. Simple programmatic cinematography is just about possible, and AI editing is getting better. 5 years away, maybe, for sitcom / soap-opera equivalent lighting and cinematography. A LOT longer before you're replacing Roger Deakins, though.
"Photo-realistic" - photorealistic CGI films have been just around the corner for 15 years now and continue to be so. Proof-of-concept 15 second renders are doable, feature-length films with non-humans are doable (albeit with a LOT of human intervention), but 90 minutes of CGI humans is a lot harder.
"Characters" - moulding their appearance is almost doable now. Motion is a lot harder - we've got semi-programmatic facial animation but it's a bit rubbish. Programmatic body animation is getting there. Programmatic voice acting is a Really Hard Problem and I'm not aware of anyone making any significant moves forward in that area.
"Unique scripts" - no-one has demonstrated anything close to an AI scriptwriter at this point. It may well be that's a problem which requires strong AI to solve.
We might be looking at Hollywood being replaced completely at some point, but I doubt it'll happen in the next 20 years.
However, what IS a huge threat to Hollywood is the increased power of indie filmmakers with technological assists. I write about that sort of thing over on my blog at http://www.strangecompany.org/blog/
One filmmaker today can do things that would have required a crew of 20 back in 1993. The cost of filmmaking is plummeting. And that certainly is a threat to Hollywood.
what are your thought on building a business model around that trend ?
If you can find a way to monetise the enormous amount of new content that's being produced right now - in excess of 10,000 feature films a year - then you have the potential to make a vast amount of money.
Discoverability and marketplaces are the key problems for film at the moment. There are other groups working on that problem, but so far it remains unresolved.
I wrote a bit about this on Charles Stross's blog a while ago - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/06/hugh-han...
> Within a few years, video games will be generating photo-realistic feature films on demand, with unique scripts and characters and worlds adapted to the viewer's tastes and mood.
You're vastly underestimating the work that goes into an authentic hollywood movie.
Also, vastly overestimating the quality of video game 3d engines, the performance requirements, the potential plot quality resulting from player-driven storylines, and so on.
The best Games are already higher quality than toy story one (1995). Both in terms of graphics and plot ex Witcher III. Game studios already make more money than Hollywood so long term Hollywood is in a death spiral.
I disagree on both counts.
Even looking at The Witcher 3 running at its highest settings, the human characters are not photo-realistic. The game itself doesn't look like something that was captured on a camera; the output includes blur filters that look impressive but unrealistic (Toy Story isn't a good measuring stick, since it's not trying to be photo-realistic; something like the 2007 Beowulf movie would be a better comparison against live-action).
The biggest games aren't as profitable as movies today. Right now, there's about 35MM consoles capable of playing The Witcher 3 (PS4 and X1). Avengers: Age of Ultron passed $1 billion this summer. For TW3 to match its sales numbers, they'd have to sell roughly 16.7MM copies at $60. Almost half the number of console owners would have to buy this game at full-price for it's revenue number to be the same (yes, the PC market will have an impact, but that's harder to measure, but that market tends to be smaller than the consoles).
Wow has made over 10 Billion which is far more than any one movie. Grand Theft Auto V made 1 billion in 3 days.
Moving up the timeline is meaningless toy story was 20 years old so the point is game year x ~= movie x - y. Means games in y = in ~20 years top games = today's movies assuming steady exponential growth. Which probably does not hold long term, but if today’s movies are ‘acceptable’ then that’s all you need.
Wow is more like a franchise than a single movie, but it beats even the strongest franchisees if you look only at box office and not other revenue sources. Though Marvel Cinematic Universe isn't far behind.
> Within a few years, video games will be generating photo-realistic feature films on demand
Games are struggling to match the offline renderings of 14 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaI7ZPA9I1c - in particular pay attention to the lightning and textures, less so the animations. Especially those off in the distance, something that games continue to struggle with in a big way.
Photo-realistic video games are very, very far off. Significantly the costs required to achieve high-end graphics these days are astronomical.
People want to movies that everyone else is watching. Then you can have enjoyable discussions of them with your friends.
few years means if we can get ray tracing and realistic human models (sorry the Coke commercial of Audrey Hepburn I did NOT find realistic at all), which seems unlikely, I'd say give it a a few decades.
Lucasfilm is already experimenting with using video game engines for their film making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdsFEMDceNg
Would Star Wars fan want Oculus Rift + Haptic Bodysuit + Star Wars world with full ray casting and realistic models?
Can you really smear a company who's reputation is already beyond repair?
Not sure if serious
As far as I'm concerned google is just an NSA data collection hub.
Like every other American company?
It's not just America, all of the "5 eyes" share data, plus the occasional deal with countries like Netherlands and Germany.
Tax dodging, conspiracy to suppress salaries, non-meritocratic compensation policies - the list goes on.
> non-meritocratic compensation policies
I'm yet to find a company which you couldn't accuse of that. The truth about humans is, no matter what your way of determining rewards are, there will always be someone to complain that they deserve more and is being treated unjustly.
Apart that the only illegal thing is the second, do you really think that people is aware of this or that they give a shit?
Plenty of people do give a shit.