Barry Diller Quotes

The only way anyone's going to succeed is to build the product.

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.

I never thought I was a very good manager.

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.

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.

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.

People, me included, have a truly emotional thing about this iPad.

Now along comes the potential creative destruction brought by a different distribution methodology, the Internet.

All forms of commerce are adversarial.

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.

We want to be able to sell you anything, anywhere, any time you want it.

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.

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.

I've always said AOL is great opportunity for somebody.

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.

Hollywood is a community that's so inbred, it's a wonder the children have any teeth.

I like businesses in transition, first of all. If ever there were a business in transition, it is publishing.

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.

The idea of a company that's earning money, not losing money, that's not, let's say 'industrially endangered,' to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one's counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level. First of all, it's certainly not necessary. It's doing it at the worst time. It's throwing people out to a larger, what is inevitably a larger unemployment heap for frankly no good reason.

Since I was in my early twenties, at ABC, I was always only interested in things that were not already being done.

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.

We're in a world now where it's not enough to be smart. You have to be curious.

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.

I still believe in synergy, but I call it natural law.

I am a contrarian.

If you have too many epiphanies, you're on some kind of drug.

Put one dumb foot in front of the other and course-correct as you go.

I don't want to set the world up for surprises.

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.

The American public tunes in every night hoping to see two people screwing. Obviously, we can't give them that but let's always keep it in mind.

This is a world in which reasons are made up because reality is too painful.

What interests me is starting businesses on our own, finding ideas that we can support, and simply investing in invention.

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.

It's not that you don't want to earn as much money as you can - it is your obligation, of course - but companies have obligations beyond that and they certainly have obligations beyond that at certain times, in the times in which they operate. And they also certainly ought to know that meeting and beating expectations is probably yesterday's game and it will be increasingly so, which would be by the way very healthy for companies. Running a company that meets and beats expectations, and that runs their company accordingly, are companies that I would question why anyone would invest in.

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.

I'm never absolutely sure of anything, and I don't want to be. You're either right and you'll pull through, or you're not. We're never going to be right about everything, and we've certainly been wrong.

The ability for consumers to receive broadcast over the air signal is their right.