An investment company has called for ideas to replace Hollywood. Y Combinator developed a new model of startup funding has said that Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline.

After the recent SOPA and PIPA outcry the movie industry has been shown to be mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. The investment outfit wants competitors to hasten the demise of Hollywood and wants to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason.

“The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they're resorting to such tactics," the outfit said. "If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn't stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it's only when he's beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref,” they added.

Ideas would include new ways to produce and distribute shows, through new media (e.g. games) that look a lot like shows but are more interactive, to things (e.g. social sites and apps) that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention. Some of the best ideas may initially look like they're serving the movie and TV industries.