Screenwriters and the Electronic Gaming Bubble

With the Electronic Gaming bubble bubbling and frothing, with Mobile Entertainment startups snapping up an unusually large share of venture funding dollars, many commodity gaming products will be hitting the market in the next few years. There is, however, an opportunity in this nightmare, for screenwriters who can make the transition from sequential story-telling to

Read Full Article »

Silicon Valley: Invite Bob and Harvey Weinstein for a chat

So, what is the spec for the next generation film studio? While Los Angeles still reigns supreme as the capital of the film industry, New York seems to be creating a niche for itself in independent “little” films. As Broadband becomes broader and more ubiquitous, what role will Silicon Valley play, to further unshackle the film industry from the clutches of the Hollywood power structure.

Open Source of Book Publishing?

I want to point my readers to Peter Redford’s experiment in creating a Publishing Empire by using the web as a democratic medium akin to Open Source … Browse Books, Inc. is a concept that Peter is experimenting with. A hypothetical press release could read … “Merged-media book publisher, BROWSE, announced today that it is

Read Full Article »

Yahoo! Beats Google in this round

Key Rhetorical Question: Who understands the content game better? Semel or Schmidt?

Monetizing Video content is inherently more difficult than Text because the KeyWord AD phenomenon that has served Google well in the Text-centric search world, will not be as effective in Video. The simple and “algorithm” oriented Text-search paradigm does not work in the Video world. Google’s strength is in algorithms. But as it grows up, algorithms will not suffice.

Key thought-provoking question: What will?

What’s after Starbucks?

It would be fair to say that Starbucks has penetrated the cultural fabric of America quite extensively. Now, it is also attempting to do the same with the rest of the world. It has become a place to get together with friends, an extended office, a pick-up joint, and many other things – different things

Read Full Article »

Should Netflix own proprietary content?

Tiffany does. HBO does. Jewelry designer Paloma Picasso designs exclusive pieces for Tiffany. It gives consumers a reason to come to Tiffany and only to Tiffany to buy designer jewelry by Paloma Picasso, Elsa Peretti and others. Roger McNamee writes: “If you are a content owner, proliferating distribution offers lots of opportunity for incremental profits.

Read Full Article »

Financing non-mainstream films

Recently, we saw the documentary Born into Brothels by Zana Briski, filmed in the brothels of Calcutta. The film has won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Documentary – a deserving recognition. It’s a beautiful film about a handful of children of prostitutes whom Zana Auntie decides to teach photography, and subsequently tries to lift

Read Full Article »

Disney and Globalization

The Media and Entertainment Industry is already going through a huge overhaul, and will continue to do so over the next decade, as Broadband finally becomes mainstream and ubiquitous, and other disruptive technology forces like Video-on-Demand (VOD), Blogs, Online Advertising, etc. start to establish stronger foothold. In this section, I would like to discuss issues

Read Full Article »