Flutterby™! : LA monopoly

Rebecca Blood pointed to: DRM and the tech industry's "girlie men":

If only I could've been there to stand up and clap:

"Why are you such a bunch of big girls?" asked Birch. "Why don't you tell the content owners to just get stuffed?" He continued unabated: "You're too seduced by the content industry, Hollywood is not even a $10 billion industry. Hollywood is small compared to the telecom industry. Why don't you take a stronger line? Consumers don't want DRM at all. You can't sell DRM."

Now he's a little understating things, I believe that $10B is just movies, and there's TV and the behemoth that is the record companies cartel (and they're tied in to the consumer electronics companies), but...

I think, to some extent, that this is exactly what's happening with Google Video, and they're not even having to make an up-front investment. But as we continue to watch Firefly(up to "Trash", kind of disappointed by "Out of Gas" through "War Stories", "Trash" got the feel back, but didn't advance the plot much) I'm looking at a number of small projects I've seen that, with a little bit of seed money, could be made cheaply and outside the Hollywood system. I'm not sure what the economics of the process are, whether the bandwidth is becoming cheap enough that net distribution can compete with broadcast (see the Dan & Todd's bandwidth bet topic) but if the big chip players want to be in the consumer electronics market, if Intel wants to make it into the living room, this would definitely be one prong in the effort to drive that push.