Ari Emanuel took no prisoners during the D-10 conference in California on Wednesday. The William Morris Endeavor agency head -- famous for being the brother of former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, as well as the inspiration for Ari Gold on "Entourage" -- said that Google needs to do a better job preventing online piracy.
"I’m going to piss a lot of people off," Emanuel said to conference attendees, a mixture of tech executives and Silicon Valley power players. "We need Northern California to figure out how to keep our intellectual property from being stolen."
According to Deadline.com, Emanuel later said that "stealing is a bad thing."
While the superagent didn't have all the answers on how Google could help prevent online piracy, a growing drag on the revenue stream of the entertainment industry as a whole, he did hope the search engine giant would "start filtering" when stealing was done internationally.
Writing for AllThingsD, the web site that organized the D-10 conference, Peter Kafka summed up Emanuel's thoughts as such:
Emanuel is fine with technology when it generates additional revenue streams for him, like when Netflix and Hulu pay up for shows his clients have already produced for TV.
But he doesn’t like Google’s technology, which he thinks enables piracy. And if you think you’re going to get HBO’s “Game of Thrones” without paying for HBO? You’re nuts.
To that end, Emanuel praised Glenn Beck as a "model" for the future of television, while also highlighting Les Moonves from CBS as "doing great."
As THR.com notes, Beck has 230,000 paid subscribers on his site and offers them exclusive content. Hulu and Netflix provide similar subscription options, which is something Emanuel is fine with -- as long as people continue to pay.
"I’m OK with them watching it on Nexflix as long as we figure out the economics and I believe premium content is more valuable than two dogs on a couch," he said.
For more on Emanuel's D-10 discussion, head over to Deadline.com.
[via Deadline.com]