@ SxSW: Michael Eisner; 'TheTime Is Right'
This story was written by Joseph Weisenthal.
Work in progress: Michael Eisner may not be the same hot ticket at SxSW as he would be elsewhere, but the conference organizers made the curious decision to put an interview of him by Mark Cuban in the smallest room in the house (just the Mavs fans alone could probably fill all the seats in here). Eisner is using SxSW as the big launchpad for the The All-For-Nots the new web show out of his digital studio Vuguru. It's the second big serial out of the studio, following the much discussed about Prom Queen. Timing-wise, today is the right day for Eisner to do his thing: The show, about a (presumably hapless) indie rock band is a fitting bridge as the interactive portion winds down and the Music festival gets set to begin. As they took the stage, Cuban made a joke about his proclivity to grab the spotlight, making a reference to lessons learned from the Mark Zuckerberg keynote.
-- The timing: Cuban asked Eisner whether the time is finally here to confidently make money with online content: "When I make a movie that bombs, I think maybe it's not the right time for movies." Point being: you can never say for sure whether you'll make money doing anything. "The time is right we're going to along for awhile and maybe make a little money and then all of the sudden we're going to wake up and then professionally driven content for the internet is going to explode."
-- Content ownership: Eisner claims that digital distributors, like MySpace et. al., have changed their attitude towards content ownership since the launch of Prom Queen. He noted that once it started to take off, the distributors have staked a claim more of the ownership of the content: "Now they want the whole pie.. they want to own all their own content." His advice: "If you take the position that you're going to own all your own content, you're going to end up with nothing."
By Joseph Weisenthal