Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

His post is interesting, fairly short, and well worth a read. Here’s the crux:

In the end, this strike is not about DVD and digital royalties. Ultimately, this strike is about the massive and traumatic erosion of privileges afforded the middle-ranking factory workers. But of course, there’s not a damn thing they or their bosses can do to bring those privileges back. The landscape of media is moving away from large studios, to college dorms, downtown lofts, and suburban garages. Like Madison Avenue, Hollywood won’t disappear. But also like Madison Avenue, it’ll never command the cultural vanguard like it once did.

(Emphasis in original.)

Here’s a sketch of what I’ve been thinking about television and where it’s headed:

• The first half of the twentieth century witnessed not one but many revolutions in the technology of entertainment. Audio recordings, silent pictures, radio, “talkies,” and television first achieved commercial success in waves roughly between 1900 and 1950. (It was this phenomenon that allowed entertainers like Bob Hope, Milton Berle, and George Burns to have careers that spanned Vaudeville, radio, films, and television.) This was only the first part of the ongoing revolution in entertainment, which has given consumers more entertainment choices than ever before.
• Talking pictures soon made silent films obsolete. With that one exception — and it’s only a partial one, since it was driven by a change within film technology — all of these technologies have survived into the twenty-first century. (For that matter, we still have live theater and printed fiction, too.) By now, of course, each technology has very different economics than it started with, as well as very different means of delivery available in every case (digital music files instead of wax cylinders or vinyl disks, digital movie files instead of celluloid, satellite or Internet radio along with terrestrial broadcast, and cable or satellite television along with terrestrial broadcast).
• The economics of each facet of the entertainment business have changed along with changes to technology and regulation. This process has often been chaotic. To the surprise of absolutely no one, the status-quo powers within entertainment have tended to resist changes to the industry that would erode their advantages.
• The process is ongoing and can be expected to continue into the foreseeable future — in practical terms, forever.

Macleod, it seems to me, is right that Hollywood’s vanguard position in entertainment is waning. Hollywood still commands huge sums of money and inordinate attention, but it also faces threats both obvious and obscure. In a hundred years, its dominance may seem as quaint as Vaudeville does to us now.

It might be worth remembering why Shakespeare spent his time writing stage plays in verse: because verse plays were the biggest game in town in Elizabethan London.