Watercooler Wednesday-Why Hollywood Is Flunking The Digital Age...

Welcome to the Ethos Watercooler Wednesday.

HERE are the guidelines. If this is your first time 'round the watercooler, PLEASE take time to read them. It will save us both a lot of time.

To join me, do a post today about Arts/Culture, put a link in your post to this post permalink (not my general URL) and then put the permalink of your post (not your general URL) here at the end of this post. Thanks.

Join me around the watercooler today and each Wednesday...

Why Hollywood Is Flunking...

"To succeed in the digital realm, Hollywood needs to offer total convenience, almost infinite choice, and the freedom to watch any way we want. Instead, we have iTunes, which delivers video you can't watch on any portable device that wasn't made by Apple, and Amazon Unbox and Netflix's Watch Instantly, which feature downloads you can't watch on any device that was made by Apple."

You can't, because Hollywood is determined to protect DVD sales at the expense of electronic downloads. That needs to be fixed — because if people don't find what they want at online storefronts, pirate copies are just a click away.

The lessons from the music fiasco are clear: Trying to limit the inherent advantages of digital files is a losing strategy. The way to stop piracy is to make everything available — easily, legally, and at a fair price. But it's a lot of work to secure Internet rights to old films and TV series from writers, directors, composers, and the like, and the studios show little inclination to monkey around with their lucrative sales to premium channels like HBO — deals that don't affect DVD sales but are written in a way that can keep electronic distribution rights locked up for years. "There would be a lot fewer Mercedes pulling up to the Palm every day without those pay-TV deals," one exec quips. Right — but how many music moguls have you seen pulling up to the Palm lately?

HT: Wired