How has the ease of sharing digitized media hurt the entertainment industry and affected its cooperation with telecoms?
They just don’t know how to take their rents out yet. The entertainment industry is thriving. There are oodles of independent producers out there. We’re having a real boom in creativity, as far as content. But the entertainment companies may not yet have figured out how to collect their profits. They own something very valuable. The question is, can they collect the rent on it? Can you talk about effective and ineffective strategies for telecom companies? In situations where there are a lot of perfectly good suppliers out there and the rate of technology is changing rapidly, you’re much better off to assemble as opposed to trying to make a lot of the value added yourself — as long as you control the access to the ultimate customer. An ineffective strategy would be to try to be vertically integrated, do it all yourself and not work a lot with outsiders. Alliances are sort of a decision about risk sharing and profit sharing and how wide you’re going to open the kimono in letting the othe
