[JamesLeonis]

I believe the problem isn't the existence of Hollywood, but that too much power is centralized in the hands of too few. Competition within the city can be likened to a Duopoly; competition in name, but far from it in practice.

I remember reading about how the RIAA companies engineer their licensing contracts in a way that forces maximum payoffs [1], and I wouldn't be surprised to find those problems in Hollywood as well.

[1]: http://gigaom.com/2011/12/11/why-spotify-can-never-be-profit...

[AJ007]

Hollywood has guilds, unions, and politics (referring to the internal.) Fall out of favor or break the rules and your out. This environment is the antithesis of creativity.

Consider an alternative market: books. Today anyone anywhere can write and sell a book to just about anyone thanks to the Kindle and other electronic book platforms. Borders went belly up and Barnes and Noble might follow. It suddenly appears that publishers serve little purpose. In this scenario publishers are Hollywood.

Movie production has become cheap. Cameras, equipment, software, the costs are going down not up. Hollywood can do nothing about this. There will always be some sort of extremistan $100m+ movies, but that amount of money is not a requirement for a good movie.

Distribution, in high definition, is unlimited with Amazon, Youtube, Netflix, Apple and others. Watching a movie at home on a 65" LCD with a good surround system is often a better experience than going to a theater and watching a poorly focused image from a projector with an underpowered bulb.

The only thing really left is for the talent to look and say, Hollywood has nothing to offer me, with Hollywood I am worse off not better.

This is all inevitable -- but, if you want to speed it up, these players need to make sure the glitz and glamor are on their side. Without it, Hollywood is going to be around for a while.

[jfoster]

If $100m+ movies continue to exist, Hollywood will continue to exist, because the majority goes to see those types of movies. To kill Hollywood, all costs around the creation & distribution of movies need to decrease tremendously to the point where they wouldn't even know how to spend $100m+ creating a movie.

[Natsu]

$100m+ movies won't exist if they can't recoup the money (according to real accounting, not Hollywood accounting). And that might happen if peoples' attention (and therefore, entertainment dollars) are spread out among more people by making more people able to entertain each other and profit from it, making it hard for any small group of people to hog the whole pie, as it were.

[JamesLeonis]

Your point about guilds et al reminded me of this great post earlier on HN where jonnathanson described why Hollywood has trouble innovating [1].

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3424496

[ijk]

The RIAA are pikers next to Hollywood accountants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting/