Diller Says Hollywood Risks Getting Overtaken by Amazon, Netflix

(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire media mogul Barry Diller said he worries that tech companies like Amazon.com Inc. and Netflix Inc. are consolidating power, threatening to undermine the way the entertainment industry works.

“I've always thought concentration -- too much concentration -- is bad,” he said in an interview airing Wednesday on “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” on Bloomberg TV. Television programs and movies are turned into fuel for subscription services, rather than products in themselves, said the chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp.

The business model at Amazon, for instance, “is absolutely antithetical, in a way, to what the business model of entertainment has been, which is you put on a show and people like it and the audience comes and they pay you,” Diller said. “Their business model is to sell subscriptions to Prime, and just as a subsidiary they give you good stuff on the side.”

Speculation has swirled that Amazon will acquire any number of entertainment businesses, including Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and Landmark Theaters.

But the risk isn't that tech giants will buy traditional entertainment companies, Diller said. “I think they'll actually supersede them.”

Hollywood's focus on sequels and remakes is another threat to the movie business, which is no longer serving as a “cultural institution,” he said. The 76-year-old executive has a long history in the industry: He ran several Hollywood studios and helped create the Fox broadcasting network.

“It's about making sequels and big, huge megamovies that are more marketing things than anything else,” he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nick Turner in Los Angeles at nturner7@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net, Rob Golum

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