Henry Blodget Quotes

When television came in, everybody thought that was the end of the movie business, which was not and is not.

The definition of strong leadership is not about making decisions that are popular. Making popular decisions is easy - you don't need to be a leader to do that. The definition of strong leadership is to make decisions that are unpopular, but are nevertheless sound.

It's all about who your team is and who your people are.

People have been predicting the death of television for 20 years now, and so far it's been entirely wrong. But it does seem viewership habits are starting to change.

There's too much bad. The worst is mediocre. Bad is easy. There's high quality, there's pornography, and then there's bad.

Digital advertising is now larger than TV.

Arrogance follows distribution strength.

Almost any show that has reviewers behind it, Rotten Tomatoes behind it, will find a way to survive.

I think the water cooler is more important than ever. "Oh, did you hear that 'Inside Amy Schumer' is fabulous?" Where do you find it? It's on Netflix, it's on iTunes, it's on places nobody ever heard of five years ago.

My mission is to figure out the journalistic model for the digital medium, finding out how we get the right stories readers want, at the right time and wherever they want to read them.

In the new world of digital, there are no must-read publications any more.

The tech folks have seen WiFi as the way to untether. And what better reason to untether than entertainment content? So there's nobody better positioned than the in-home Wi-Fi purveyor.

You have to have a business model you believe in and like.

Some things go slow, slow, slow, and then - wham! - they're over.

Before the internet, a journalist would write an article about a company that the company felt was unfair and missed a point. All they could do was write a letter to the editor and wait, and maybe a week later it would be printed, or not. Now, they can go to medium.com and immediately publish a long rebuttal, saying the journalist forgot this and did not consider that, the analyst is wrong here. Everybody pulls that immediately into the debate. So it is a much more democratic field for ideas.

The first reaction is, get defensive. Second reaction is, what are we going to do about it?

Television is like the movie business. It's not the least-objectionable program - it's the best program that gets positioned. Same in the movie business. It's not just everything automatically gets done by the "in" crowd.

It's very hard to be good. It is self-destructive thinking to think that there is too much good.

Television is not hurting. Television is in fantastic shape. It's just a golden age for other people.

The content defines the platform, so whereas when I was working at ABC from '66 to '76, people said it was the "great wasteland." It was the least-objectionable program that succeeded. It was, if you could get behind "All in the Family," you were successful.

I'm no expert in vibrators, but I was surprised to learn that one could fit in that little box.

In the era of networks only, I cannot tell you the number of shows that we don't know about that did not survive. They got canceled. But there are a few that survived by accident, because they didn't have anything else to do, and they stayed with it.

People don't have to go to cable news or network news. Live sports is the one of many things that's kind of community television. There are a lot of people who still tune in to "Sunday Night Football" or "Thursday Night Football" the way they did before.

Pornography works to a degree, high quality works, bad is obvious. Nobody goes for bad. The terrible middle ground is the mediocre. That was kind of the essence, in a way, of broadcast television when there were only three channels.

Some people have made a fortune by being employed. Jerry Bruckheimer does not own his content. Warner Bros. owns his shows. They are on CBS, and he makes a fortune.