Jonathan Taplin
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"Jonathan Trumbull Taplin" is an American writer, film producer and scholar. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio and has lived in Los Angeles since 1973. Taplin graduated from Princeton University in 1969 and is currently the Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication/Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Taplin is married to the photographer Maggie Smith and has three children: Daniela Lundberg, a film producer; Nicholas Taplin, a audio engineering/recording engineer and Blythe Taplin, a human rights lawyer.

Taplin's early production work included producing concerts for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first major feature film, Mean Streets which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for the Public Broadcasting Service) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until the end of the World, Under Fire (film)/Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards and chosen for the Cannes Film Festival six times. Taplin is the author of Outlaw Blues: Adventures in the Counter-Culture Wars, an enhanced eBook from Annenberg Press.

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This notion of some grand battle between content owners and network owners, I think it's specious. Network owners can partition bandwidth in such a way that everyone can have access to the Internet in a way we have today and provide some value-added services. There should be plenty of room for everyone to do what they want.

Ninety percent of the people on 'Survivor' you never hear from again either so, you know, Andy Warhol was right. They had their 15 minutes of fame - and that was it.

Michelle Kwan's story is a little bit sad and she's not a winner, she's a loser.

Disney can give advertisers very specific demographic information about each viewer, so you might get a very different ad than your wife would and a completely different ad than your teenage daughter would.

It's never been the studios' way to just sell movies to their own channels.

I'm not sure that a company wants Michelle Kwan as a spokesperson at this point because she's not perceived to be victorious.

They're already on to the next generation.

There are people out there who are comfortable watching video on the Web.

It's just a natural evolution.