And I hear your concerns, David. Will Ferrell is up against odds that are only slightly better than the creme de la creme of independent producers who are succeeding online at a much more modest scale. But then I think that everyone in the entertainment industry is going to have to come terms with a dose of modesty — the concentration of media channels necessitated by traditional one-way broadcast technology is no longer sustainable, and everyone is going to have to deal with eating smaller pieces of a larger pie.

To make a business analogy, think of the difference between industrial agribusiness and supermarkets versus victory gardens and farmer’s markets. Where would you rather shop? And frankly, how would you prefer your food produced? I’m going with homegrown tomatoes and fruit from local family farms whenever I have the option, personally.

Well, I don’t disagree in principal because it would be very interesting to see this unfold, but how would these guys make money? You don’t get much cash from putting your movies on Veoh. The whole Hollywood infrastructure is currently predicated upon selling to mass audiences, which don’t really exist on the web (at least not in the same way) …

Going direct to the consumer is not an easy transition to make… If they were to create their own sites, who would pay for the bandwidth costs? Streaming video is very expensive and difficult to scale. Would they run ads? AdSense doesn’t provide much cash, and these guys might not have the ad agency relationships required to sell pre- and mid-roll ad inventory for decent CPMs, and the agency clients don’t want their ads on an unknown startup. A’ la carte downloads on iTunes might work… But how would they market their content? It’s not easy to get people to show up for anything on the web.