Why Bother with Hollywood?
I recently read a post on Y-Combinator on the movement to destroy Hollywood and replace the antiquated entertainment industry with a more modern approach. Although I agree with the sentiment that Hollywood is an obsolete behemoth that is essentially creating a too-big-to-fail problem for the labor market in the entertainment industry, I don't think people really need to take an action against them and purposefully try to boycott the product and services produced there. The fact of the matter is, at least in the motion picture industry, it is already on its way to become irrelevant in some ways.
As the industry become an increasingly intertwined entity, it becomes increasingly risk-averse. This is particularly true with the motion picture industry. Just go to any movie theater and look at the listings. I guarantee you that most of the movies are either a sequel, a film based on other traditional media (book, comics, cartoons, childhood heroes) that has already proven to be successful. In another words, they are only transferring other successful products to the big screen, instead of creating truly innovative products. Well, there's also some gimmicky innovations such as 3D movies, but that's not the main product of Hollywood, which is movie production. If the trend keeps going, and with the continuing drop of production cost of independent entertainment, it is only a matter of time before amateurs can produce movies and shorts that are just as good as the ones produced in Hollywood. And with the advantage of creative output, they can easily beat the service offer by the big guys. Furthermore, because the way we view entertainment has significantly diverged (we spend more and more time entertained by Youtube than by TV shows and movie) that the market share of movie in the entertainment industry as a whole will only drop. As such, there really isn't any reason Y-Combinator to allocate resources to specifically target Hollywood.