Disruption: David Pakman's Blog

Last week’s announcement by the Justice Department that they are suing Apple and several of the world’s biggest book publishers for conspiring to keep eBook prices high generated plenty of media coverage. One challenge in wading through this coverage is that most of it tends to be written by…journalists. And some journalists are also authors. [...]

My friend and former colleague Greg Scholl sent me an article this week and a provocative quote jumped out of it. Here is the view of Irwin Gotlieb, CEO of one the largest global advertising agencies on the planet, as he shared his view on this year’s CES. Given last week’s SOPA/PIPA debate, I thought Mr. Gotlieb’s [...]

Lots of debate, lately, about Big Media and their bumpy transitions from analog incumbents to digital providers. Over the past few weeks we have had debates around the proposed PIPA and SOPA legislation, Rupert Murdoch (that bastion of new media savvy) railing against Google as a “pirate” and @fredwilson chiming in on the predictable monopoly [...]

While there are countless examples of emerging technologies disrupting incumbent industries, there are very few examples of new industries beating the old through legislation. Generally, Washington influence and power is amassed over many years as nascent companies and industries grow. Few industries have the power and influence of the copyright industry. Coincidentally, very few industries [...]

Coming out of the eG8 conference this week, there has been a bunch of discussion about copyright, piracy and the the continued erosion of traditional media business models. As readers of this blog know, I have discussed this in many posts over the years, like Jeff Bewkes’ Empty Netflix Threats, Why Netflix Won, A Few [...]

As a venture investor in internet companies, I look for technology-based innovation which causes major disruption among incumbents. Since advertising is the dominant business model for most of the web, I think a lot about these technologies and their impact on the future. Clearly the new devices we use to access information and entertainment are [...]

Jeff Bewkes at Time Warner spouted some silly “threats” at Netflix this week, the latest sign that some content owners in the digital age forget who butters their bread. We saw this same thing happen in the music industry multiple times. Any time a distribution channel emerged that provided significant volume, the labels would start [...]

Very few digital media upstarts have been able to build scale businesses in online entertainment. No startup has succeeded at scale in digital music (with only Apple and, barely, Amazon registering any level of success — these are hardly startups). In online video, clearly YouTube reached scale (but had no meaningful business) when it was [...]

Paul McGuinness, the esteemed business manager of U2, penned an essay (can we still say “penned”?) for GQ UK called “How To Save The Music Industry.” He says piracy killed the music business and he calls on tech entrepreneurs to help save it. Although it pains me to disagree with someone who helped build the [...]

The iPad was announced on January 27, 2010 and was quickly heralded by many in traditional print media as a potential rejuvenator for their troubled businesses. Having used the device daily for the last six weeks or so, I must admit it is the perfect media consumption device, among many other things, for all of my [...]