Barry Diller
Hollywood is a community that's so inbred, it's a wonder the children have any teeth.
I've always said AOL is great opportunity for somebody.
I still believe in synergy, but I call it natural law.
I'm just saying if you want to reach large audiences, then rely on professionals, meaning people who are in the industry and are trained for it, rather than just idiot savants.
There's no way you can predict what is going to happen in six months or two years in most businesses, and certainly not for businesses that are growing at the rate that we have grown.
You really want to get a headache? Try to understand Internet advertising.
This is a world in which reasons are made up because reality is too painful.
The world is changing. Networks without a specific branding strategy will be killed. I envision a world of highly niched services and tightly run companies without room for all the overhead the established networks carry.
We want to be able to sell you anything, anywhere, any time you want it.
Sometimes it seems like there's more footnotes than text. This isn't something we're proud of, and over time we'd like to see our footnotes steadily shrink.
If we're going to talk about our businesses, we're going to have to talk about them within the constraints of the disclosure rules, without giving guidance, because we're not going to give guidance, because we don't believe that it is a sensible game to play.
The entertainment business hasn't had a new idea in years.
What I've learned over the years is that focus and singular purpose is the best approach for businesses.
If you're going to run a public company, be absolutely certain of what the parameters are, what the clarity is, that you can explain it to yourselves and explain it externally.
Companies like GE and Procter & Gamble have been in business for a long time. Over decades or a century you're bound to figure out a management structure that works.
I don't have answers for anybody else. What I know is that internal complexity makes for superficiality. There's never essentially a pure story unless there's a pure product line that has its own shining clarity.
What interests me is starting businesses on our own, finding ideas that we can support, and simply investing in invention.
People, me included, have a truly emotional thing about this iPad.
We need an unambiguous rule - a law - that nobody will step between the publisher and the consumer, full stop.
I'm sure there are some commercial applications for Twitter, but they don't really interest me. I mean, 140 characters? I am really not interested in Ashton Kutcher's daily walks. Not for me.
Facebook's the real deal. Nobody can buy Facebook now. Everybody has taken an angle at it. But Facebook may be the place that organizes everybody's personal information. It's got a very good chance of being that.
Well, the Internet is this miracle. It is an absolutely extraordinary idea that you can press a send button, and you are publishing to the world.
I've not conducted my life in the service of smallness.
I am a contrarian.
What's happened to broadcasting is that broadcasting really used to be... it used to have a very clear public service quotient. And it's more or less now. And it's been lost.
My opinion, young people go to the Internet. To the Internet distribution system right now, you put it up there and it's accessed by the world.
The ability for consumers to receive broadcast over the air signal is their right.
What we need to do is replace the entire tax code. I do not think it makes sense to say, 'Let's just grab money from, quote, the wealthy'... The issue is the tax code's rotten and we should start truly over with a simple code that is fair and transparent.
We have a tax code whose complications and levels of unfairness and levels of choosing people to give tax breaks to and choosing people to deny them to is thousands of pages long with endless complications and unbelievable manipulations by everybody.
Broadcasting began, essentially, in the hands of very, very few players - actually two - and when television came along, there were two networks, then three. Rules began to get formulated that essentially protected that concentrated group.
Since I was in my early twenties, at ABC, I was always only interested in things that were not already being done.
Now along comes the potential creative destruction brought by a different distribution methodology, the Internet.
Twenty years ago, there were dozens and dozens of independent television producers. There are a couple now, at the most. Mark Burnett, Endemol. It's gone. Everybody works for the Man now. And it's natural law, how that happened: Nobody prescribed it, but it's how things worked out and how it has been for decades, period.
No one can solve an issue where there is no economic model yet.
I like businesses in transition, first of all. If ever there were a business in transition, it is publishing.
Napster has pointed the way for a new direction for music distribution, and we believe it will form the basis of important and exciting new business models for the future of the music industry.
Urbanspoon is a nice, little application and it's perfect, of course, for CitySearch because of the reviews it contains and the ability for CitySearch to use that content.
The directories businesses still make nothing but money. They're overleveraged, they're bankrupt entities, but they still are the largest. This is all going to move online over time. Why Citysearch and Service Magic are so important to us, is because nobody has really colonized it yet completely.
The business model for content is to be paid for it. You can be paid for it either though advertising or subscriptions or some new invention, but right now what we've got is advertising revenue and subscription revenue as the only way to be paid for content.
Ticketmaster does not set prices. Live Nation does not set ticket prices. Artists set ticket prices.
Who ever knows what will happen with the economy, and will it affect the Internet? There's so much pouring into the Internet; I would doubt it, but I'm not the greatest predictor. But more than any media sector, I think the Internet will hold up.
I don't want to set the world up for surprises.
The only way anyone's going to succeed is to build the product.
I absolutely believe the Internet is passing from its free days into a paid system. Inevitably, I promise you, it will be paid.
People have paid for content. They always have.
If you're going to sell stock and somebody wants to buy it at a price and that price is not a price you dictate, but demand dictates, sell it to them now.
I never thought I was a very good manager.
Aereo is the first potentially transformative technology that has the chance to give people access to broadcast television delivered over the Internet to any device, large or small, they desire. No wires, no new boxes or remotes, portable everywhere there's an Internet connection in the world - truly a revolutionary product.
We're in a world now where it's not enough to be smart. You have to be curious.Collection: Smart
Put one dumb foot in front of the other and course-correct as you go.Collection: Feet