Surprise: Hollywood Favors Short-Term Fads to Long-Term Strategy

from the in-the-long-term,-the-MPAA-is-dead... dept

Fri, Mar 14th 2008 9:08am — Mike Masnick

It's no secret that the entertainment industry has some execs who are positively proud of the fact that they'll sacrifice long-term strategy for short-term gains, but you'd hope that there was someone, somewhere with a powerful position in the industry who would point out why that's not a particularly intelligent strategy. Take, for example, the MPAA's position on net neutrality. Last summer, the MPAA sent a letter to the FCC opposing net neutrality on the grounds that it would hinder its anti-piracy efforts. It would appear that the MPAA is getting more vocal about this, as MPAA boss Dan Glickman repeated the charges yet again that net neutrality would harm its business.

Of course, the only way that's actually true is if the MPAA views the internet as mostly being about piracy, rather than a future distribution channel. Because, as Jon Healy points out in the link above, in a non-neutral internet, where ISPs get to charge extra to heavy bandwidth users, the movie studios are suddenly going to find that it's a lot more expensive to distribute movies (extremely high bandwidth items) online, since that will be exactly what the tollbooths are set up for. So, in coming out against net neutrality, the MPAA is basically saying that it wants distribution costs online to be higher. Perhaps it's no surprise. The industry really doesn't want to embrace the online world, as is quite evident from its repeated half-assed efforts at creating online movie download services. Perhaps Glickman and the studio bosses really believe that they can go back to a world where only the studios control the distribution mechanisms, even if they're a lot more expensive, cumbersome and inefficient. It does seem odd, though, that any business would prefer that its distribution systems be more expensive and less useful -- but that just goes to show you the level of strategic thinking that sometimes goes on in Hollywood.

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Filed Under: dan glickman, long-term, mpaa, net neutrality, short-term, strategy

7 Comments

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Hellsvilla, 14 Mar 2008 @ 10:15am

The entertainment cartel is dying
The entertainment cartel is at war with its consumerbase. But it doesn't want to die, and it will force both sides into heavy casualties before it's eradicated.

Isn't that a shame?
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Shuryno, 14 Mar 2008 @ 10:57am

There's something really pathetic about a business that tells it's users "Who cares what you want, here's what we want".

Worse is, there only needs to be 1 major player taking the dip...the rest will crumble.

So yeah, I agree with Hellsvilla. I just hope it will be over before to much blood is spilled.
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Michael Kohne, 14 Mar 2008 @ 11:40am

Short-term thinking...
Since the big players in the entertainment industry are (unless I'm mistaken) publicly held, then it's not at all surprising that they'd only take a short term view of things. Wall Street does NOT reward long-term strategic thinking. It rewards short-term gains in stock price. This has trained most high level executives to not plan very far in advance, but rather to work toward the next quarter or (at most) the next year.

You can't really blame people for doing what their employer wants them to do. Executives are hired by the board, the board is answerable to the shareholders, and most of the shareholders are idiots that want the stock price to jump every quarter. So the executives are just doing their job and looking toward short term profits.
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cutter892, 14 Mar 2008 @ 2:21pm

Re: Short-term thinking...
Actually this seems to be a trend in are culture in general. Everybody seems to be looking for the quick buck and fast, easy fix. The concept of working for the long term and planning ahead just don't seem to be grasped by a lot of people. You can see evidence of this in legislation as well. Sadly it's going to take a lot of things to crumble and a lot of people to go why didn't I see this coming to get things changed.
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Rekrul, 14 Mar 2008 @ 9:57pm

If you were to set a switch in front of the execs in charge of the movie and music industries and tell them "This is a magic button that when pressed will permanently disable every technology in the world capable of being used to infringe your copyrights, regardless of whether such devices have legitimate uses." they'd be pounding on it like maniacs without giving it a second thought. Then they'd wonder why none of their cameras, or recording equipment would work anymore.
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mandeep rai, 12 Sep 2008 @ 9:53am

hi.....
what are you doing
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mandeep rai, 12 Sep 2008 @ 9:54am

hi.....
what are you doing
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