From an article in Forbes magazine, circa January 1994: Entertainment is becoming as mobile as money. In the 1950s, Hollywood moguls established hegemony by monopolizing U.S. movie theaters. Antitrust litigators forced a divestiture. Hollywood has since reinvested in theaters, but today's antitrust police just yawn, because theaters now account for barely 20% of movie revenues. Television deals generate just under 40%. The biggest single earner is tapes for videocassette recorders, those pernicious Japanese gadgets that Hollywood worked so hard to kill a decade ago. The VCR, it turned out, was a superhighway in a box -- just what Hollywood needed to double its profits. More recently, a Beatles movie was transmitted in highly compressed form over the Internet. Within a few years it will be as easy to download compressed movies by telephone as it is to unload the family fortune. ... Nobody has any clear idea what will be the dominant distribution medium for entertainment or wealth at the end of the decade. You can be pretty sure, however, that it won't be whatever culture police choose to guard most closely. The New Maginot Line |