Michael Lynton Quotes

I sold Blockbuster because I saw what was coming: the satellite dish, technology that would make the business obsolete in a few years. Why would people go to a store for a video and then have to return it when they had a dish?

It's a good time to be in the content business though, the branded content business.

My films do very well on home video.

The online video business started in both China and the US around 2005/6, when broadband penetration grew big enough.

It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.

I do not buy CDs any more; I usually stream Internet radio. For movies, I hardly every buy any DVDS. I have a DVR, so just record things off HBO, Showtime and so on.

I love Netflix and Amazon and watching movies on streamers as much as the next person.

My movies make a profit, but obviously not a fortune.

I don't know if I have good habits, but I'm very devoted to writing. I'm very compulsive about having a project, at least one, and trying to follow the business as much as I can. I keep on top of all the entertainment business news.

I love the market, it is my work, my play and my life.

In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.

Now, DVD can represent more income than the box office-and typically does.

You know, when we were kids, we had to go to a theater to see a movie. And then television came in and you had to wait until midnight to see the one you wanted to see. Now, all you've got to do is go to a store and buy it and you can watch it whenever you want!

Business 2.0 was hugely profitable last year, and will be profitable this year.

The key, I think, from a business point of view, is to learn how to be efficient in making a record that's not too expensive, so that you're not going crazy spending tons of money making a product that might not ever return that money.

The thing that interests me least about the radio business is the radio business. But I've had to learn a little bit about it. It's not rocket science: You get ratings, that's good.

The stories about broadcast dying or it being overtaken by cable have stopped. Same goes for the stories about the Internet hurting our business.

The digital apocalypse continues to blight the lives of television producers, music-industry executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure their business models in such a way as to allow them to make an honest buck.

That is the godawful thing about television today. Performers don't have any place to hit and miss. You're either in or you're out; you don't have a chance to become good at your craft. If you make three pictures in a row and they don't go over, you're out of the business.

I consider Apple to be very closed. Let's say you have a book business, and you are charging 5 to 7 percent gross margins; you can't exist in an Apple world because they want 30 percent, and they don't care that you only have 7 percent to play with.

Everybody knows things are not the same. The people running the TV end of a major vertically integrated company know how much money a successful show can make.

I care deeply about journalism, but we need to be a business.

I think YouTube used to have a negative connotation, like it was the place where the rejects went and made careers, but I'm proud to be YouTuber. I wanted to be in that first generation of YouTube stars who transitioned into the 'real world.' It was a really good way to build my business.

2008 was a good - a very successful year for Volkswagen.

You're either making money or you're not. If you're not making money get out of the business.