It’s about the MONEY!<\/p>\n
I have a friend.\u00c2\u00a0 He had a joint venture label with a major company.\u00c2\u00a0 Said company wanted to buy him out.\u00c2\u00a0 He was on a major hot streak.\u00c2\u00a0 He didn’t know what to do.\u00c2\u00a0 Whether to continue to gamble or take the money.\u00c2\u00a0 His attorney said SOMETIMES YOU’VE GOT TO TAKE SOME MONEY OFF THE TABLE!<\/p>\n
That’s what Steve Jobs is doing here.<\/p>\n
Do you know the movie business?<\/p>\n
It truly proves the adage that DISTRIBUTION is king, and not CONTENT!\u00c2\u00a0 God, in an era when even DREAMWORKS fails and has to throw in with the major do you want to go it alone?\u00c2\u00a0 With the major skimming profits for exhibiting your movie.\u00c2\u00a0 Controlling all your money.\u00c2\u00a0 The major can package films in a TV sale.\u00c2\u00a0 Leverage the GOOD ones with the BAD ones.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re truly not hit dependent.\u00c2\u00a0 They’ve got huge LIBRARIES!<\/p>\n
What has Pixar got?\u00c2\u00a0 Six hit movies?<\/p>\n
Nobody’s hot forever.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody gets cold eventually.<\/p>\n
It would be one thing to sell out after two hits, or even three, but after six, the odds are you’re going to have a failure.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, the aforementioned DreamWorks was hot at FIRST!<\/p>\n
FURTHERMORE, what is not included in all the spin and analysis in the business press about the synergy and content and other bullshit advantages to Mr. Jobs in this deal, is the decline in DVD sales.<\/p>\n
You see DVDs used to sell for a long period of time.\u00c2\u00a0 But beginning just over a year ago, this is no longer the case.\u00c2\u00a0 Call it the Wal-Mart factor.\u00c2\u00a0 Wal-Mart buys a ton of product initially, promotes the hell out of it, to get people into the store to buy higher-margin goods, and then moves on to the NEXT title, to repeat the formula, and YOUR DVD is stocked on a minor aisle far from the cash register and excess inventory is RETURNED to you.\u00c2\u00a0 Sales TANK!\u00c2\u00a0 Look at the reports.\u00c2\u00a0 Pixar missed their targets a year ago, even though they had FINDING NEMO in DVD release.\u00c2\u00a0 DreamWorks Animation missed its targets TWICE and is now being investigated by the SEC.<\/p>\n
The studio always has a new DVD to ship Wal-Mart, they’ve got a steady flow of product.\u00c2\u00a0 The independent?<\/p>\n
So, Steve Jobs takes his money from a one trick pony and invests it in a diversified company.\u00c2\u00a0 That owns THEME PARKS AND TV STATIONS in addition to movie production and distribution.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s playing it SAFE!<\/p>\n
As for Jobs leveraging his stock position…\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, Michael Eisner was the LARGEST stockholder of Disney and he got SQUEEZED OUT!<\/p>\n
It’s not like Sumner Redstone and Viacom.\u00c2\u00a0 Where he could leverage all his properties in advertising sales.\u00c2\u00a0 And, even SUMNER broke the company in two.\u00c2\u00a0 So much for synergy.<\/p>\n
And, if Jobs DOES lean on Disney to deliver…\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a PUBLIC COMPANY!\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a RAT’S NEST of obligations\/regulations.\u00c2\u00a0 There are corporate bylaws.\u00c2\u00a0 State and federal laws.\u00c2\u00a0 And don’t tell me the sun’s not going to shine on anything Apple and Disney do.\u00c2\u00a0 God, Steve Jobs FARTS and it’s in the paper.<\/p>\n
Steve IS trying to drag the content companies into the future.\u00c2\u00a0 And, this will make Disney somewhat of an ally.\u00c2\u00a0 But he already had Bob Iger as an ally.\u00c2\u00a0 If he just reupped distribution with him he’d STILL have him as an ally.\u00c2\u00a0 Furthermore, Sony OWNS a movie studio and can’t seem to get Blu-ray HD DVDs to be the standard.\u00c2\u00a0 No, Jobs will make it on his smarts, INNOVATION, not backroom dealings.\u00c2\u00a0 God, if he were about backroom dealings wouldn’t he have already caved into the record labels and given them variable pricing?\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, he could have BLAMED it on them if there was a consumer backlash.<\/p>\n
Now Steve Jobs can sleep at night.\u00c2\u00a0 He doesn’t have to keep his mind on his money 24\/7.\u00c2\u00a0 He can focus on Apple.\u00c2\u00a0 He can focus on changing the world.<\/p>\n
And, with Pixar off his brain, EXPECT HIM TO!<\/p>\n
Rumor has it there WAS a movie distribution scheme scheduled to be introduced at Macworld, it’s just that Intel could not deliver enough chips.<\/p>\n
And make no mistake.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s happening in Cupertino is STILL light years more interesting than what’s happening in Burbank.\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s not BUZZ LIGHTYEAR!<\/p>\n
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It’s about the MONEY! I have a friend.\u00c2\u00a0 He had a joint venture label with a major company.\u00c2\u00a0 Said company wanted to buy him out.\u00c2\u00a0 He was on a major hot streak.\u00c2\u00a0 He didn’t know what to do.\u00c2\u00a0 Whether to continue to gamble or take the money.\u00c2\u00a0 His attorney said SOMETIMES YOU’VE GOT TO TAKE […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-4Q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}