Additional reporting from the Conference panel Venture Beat article

jpr | September 11, 11:01 CET

I love how Joss makes me look up words... :) Bifurcation - I will need to use that somewhere to remember it.

Braeden Fireheart | September 11, 14:00 CET

Watched this live last night. "Let's get back to my awesomeness, you glossed right over that" or something to that effect.

deadbessie | September 11, 14:33 CET

deadbessie - watched it live where?
I'm so pleased that Joss and co realize that while many people did pirate the soundtrack, they also bought it when it was made available. That it was better quality was really an incidental.

Lioness | September 11, 16:02 CET

Sometimes I wonder whether the Dr. Horrible paradigm will translate as a business model for other, non-Whedon projects on the web, as Joss hopes. Joss's fans are loyal and want to pay to show their support for his work, yes -- but will "regular" folks feel the same way? I don't know, I think most people (who aren't part of a dedicated fan group such as ours) won't necessarily want to pay for something they can get free; it's human nature. I have to wonder whether the 24/7 availability of Dr. Horrible on Hulu dilutes the potential for DVD sales down the line. JMHO.

pillboxed | September 11, 16:15 CET

Joss Whedon FTW. I love this not because it applies to me and ow I have handled Dr Horrible....but because it is true. I bought all 3 episodes and the soundtrack and anxiously await the DVD release.

"Whedon: No… Fans said when Dr. Horrible soundtrack came out, this sounds better than the pirated one. Piracy is going to happen. But they also said quite plainly we want to pay for this."

h0stile17 | September 11, 16:29 CET

I love any explanation rich in biology references and most especially, any mention of dinosaurs.

Sunfire | September 11, 16:36 CET

Joss did not make up the word bifurcation.

Also, people forget, in terms of business model, that Joss had people agreeing to work for free and/or deferred payment and also apparently called in some favors (like the Uni backlot). That's not a business model everyone else can duplicate.

The One True b!X | September 11, 16:54 CET

Did someone suggest he made it up?

Sunfire | September 11, 17:01 CET

No, that was me being unable to read with just-woke-up bleary-eyes and thinking a comment said "how he makes up words" instead of "makes me look up words".

The One True b!X | September 11, 17:06 CET

Pillboxed said,


While this is a valid question, I ususually argue that free availability creates more visibility which in turn will enable more people to 'sample' and turn into customers if the show is any good, ie. free availability makes more sales not less.

Love the dinosaur analogy it's good in so many ways.
- Small brains, huge bodies.
- Dont care much for the little people.
- When they squash a show, they squash it flat.
- When they hear distant thunder they think possible food source, not hey that could be the sound of the extinction of our species.
- And oh yea, suddenly one day there where no dinosaurs around anymore.

[ edited by jpr on 2008-09-11 17:23 ]

jpr | September 11, 17:12 CET

I like what the panelists are saying about interactivity with fans... *thinky*

ProgGrrl | September 11, 18:24 CET

Saje, your admissions from the '80s in the 2nd TechCrunch thread have successfully been expunged from our collective memory!

Your conscience is now clear! (time to sin again...)

SteveP | September 11, 19:01 CET

I found out about it from a Twitter (a tweet?) just before it started streaming. I think this is the link but I'm at work at can't check.

Hope that helps, because Joss was funny.

deadbessie | September 11, 19:16 CET

- And oh yea, suddenly one day there where no dinosaurs around anymore.

Except for all those freaking birds everywhere. What is up with those, anyway?

Dr. Horrible is like Archaeopteryx, you see. How the industry manages itself is going to have to change. Except unlike evolution, business practices can change deliberately.

Sunfire | September 11, 19:26 CET

Your conscience is now clear! (time to sin again...)

Muhuhahahahah ! ;)

- And oh yea, suddenly one day there where no dinosaurs around anymore.

Yeah but in fairness, dinosaurs are, by some lights, the most successful land animal the world has ever seen. When we've been around 140+ million years we can start talking about how the dinosaurs just disappeared one day (I have no idea how that relates to the metaphorical dinosaurs though - not at all would be my first guess ;).

Not a huge amount of new info there but Joss is right I reckon, the studios (from what i've seen so far) seem to view the net as "just" a new distribution medium, it doesn't seem like any of them are thinking about genuinely new types of content (or even ,necessarily, new ways of doing business - yet). Max Planck said (via Google ;) that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it", could be it's the same for new types of media too.

Saje | September 11, 19:27 CET

@deadbessie: thanks so much for the TechCrunch link...I missed all the live streams I wanted to see, and couldn't figure out how to find any of it cached afterwards.

ProgGrrl | September 12, 16:52 CET

Sunfire said,
If the big studios managed to survive by evolving into smaller more nimble creatures with a shorter distance between brain and extremities, no one would be happier than me, maybe there should be be another bullet point.
- Those dinosaurs that evolved survived.

Saje by any measure todays big media companies are very successful, but evolution works faster nowadays :).

There seems to be a lot of the trial-and-error stuff going on at the moment regarding the possible future business models, hopefully we wont have to wait for a whole generation of studio moguls to be replaced, the first financially successful experiment will quickly make converts out of all of them. Big bucks talks loud and clear, just look at the reality wave.

[ edited by jpr on 2008-09-13 07:16 ]

jpr | September 12, 19:05 CET