Writer, Agilist, Elder Geek
You know those friends and fellow fans that are incredibly talented but don't have work? Yeah, I thought so. You wonder what you can do for them when they are so talented, so gifted, yet are looking for work. It's easy to wonder since they're so good at what they do, you're left wondering what you can do.
What you can do is give these talented people a chance to use their talent for you – and thus give them a chance to earn money, build skills, and gain another reference (that's you here).
We've been discussing the video wars here (part of the Everything Wars) for quite some time–indeed it seems we started pretty much around the blogs founding. Now, years later, though Netflix still dominates all there are quite a few services – Hulu, Vudu, Amazon.com, possibly even Facebook, and so on. It seems a lot of people want a piece of the video market, even if they're not quite sure why, how, or what they want.
Now, as noted, Netflix still dominates, and if I may say, rightly so – they've been at this for years and did a good job. But nothing is forever and there's a lot of competition, lots of current and future legal battles, and always the chance for people to do stupid or smart things.
(Serdar, one of our regular posters, noted once that Hollywood isn't in the creativity business – it's in the risk management business. He directed me to this article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/movies/manohla-dargis-and-a-o-scott-on-hollywoods-crisis.html?_r=1&hpw, which got me thinking.)
The state of Hollywood fascinates me, both due to my interest in cultural issues and the fact that it is part of the Geekonomy. I do see some innovative films peaking through, but I also see plenty of dreck. The sheer amounts of remakes in the queue tells me that Hollywood certainly is aiming at reducing risk in many cases (not that risk-taking has always been weird in hollywood). I look at the amount of reality television out there and shake my head – even the good stuff doesn't make up for the repetitious crap.
In many ways, too many media endeavors are simply extraction industries – extracting the most amount safely from whatever resources are there with least risk, and often little concern for the future. Though this may be understandable, it's really not good in the long or even medium-term.
If you think about it, your average huge media company may have many, many advantages, but also needs to pay for all that entails (lawyers, marketing, etc.). The efforts they engage in, large mega–million-dollar efforts, also have the ability to screw up beyond belief. Let's face it, putting out a big movie or video game is a great way to lose money if you do it wrong.