Popular tech incubator aims to ‘kill Hollywood’
By Alexis • Jan 23rd, 2012 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: Robert Scoble / Flickr
Following a week of high drama where the future of the internet as we know it was hanging in the balance due to the controversial SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy bills in the US, Y Combinator has sent out a request for startups with a focus on the media industry and with the intent to ‘Kill Hollywood’.
Why Kill Hollywood?
Y Combinator, an incubator for web startups including mega-hits like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Heroku, issued its ninth request for startups, wherein it states that ‘SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying’. The startup incubator says that Hollywood won’t fade quietly like other declining industries do, because ‘The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down.’
The challenge
When asking the how and what part of the killing of Hollywood, Y Combinator says ‘What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people,’ and not filesharing, as Hollywood, SOPA, and PIPA seem to suggest. The incubator continues, saying: ‘So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?’
Parting thoughts
Y Combinator’s call to ouster Hollywood from its perch comes at a time when the film industry is facing ever-mounting challenges from other forms of entertainment competing for people’s time, as well as independent programming often times that of Hollywood quality being increasingly easier to access due largely to the internet. This request for startups to ‘Kill Hollywood’ would only serve to make the distribution and content creation platforms designed to compete with Hollywood only more numerous, and more effective, too.
Where SOPA/PIPA were seen as a way to protect Hollywood, they’ve only served as a rallying call to upend it, at least for a small sliver of highly influential entrepreneurs.
Tags for this article: piracy
Here’s our response to Paul. We’re on it and changing the way reality TV is produced and distributed over the web on any device.
https://plus.google.com/104744911050510468464/posts/GRfzgSuST3p