One of my favorite TV shows is Sunday Morning Shootout, AMC’s movie biz face-off between Variety editor Peter Bart and former studio head Peter Guber.
This past weekend, the topic was the decline of the DVD business and the possibility of simultaneous release in theaters, on DVD, and across all other media.
As usual, Guber made some brilliant points which will hit home to those of us in radio facing our own techno-trend demons:
“All technology is interim,” Guber said. The explosion and decline in DVD’s is simply an accelerated curve to the kinds of rise and fall that has always accompanied technology.
As for the recluctance of theater-owners to embrace simultaneous release (a model which is very likely to threaten their existence), Guber noted “the movie, not the movie-going, is the experience.”
Finally, this pearl: “It’s always gonna be not the zeroes and ones, but the oooh’s and aaaah’s.”
So I ask you again, are you in the content business or the radio business?