uhhhh....

Nothing is go to pay the upper tier writers as well as TV. There are not enough movie script sales to support that large of a group. There isn't much money on the web...

I guess they could write the great American novel :).

My friends at Bitgravity.com report a measurable upswing in online video consumption since the writers' strike.

-Stiennon

I have a hard time imagining something that turns out great for either the studios or the striking writers at this point. The studios will lose, that's certain. There's no way that viewership and sponsorship will be anywhere near pre-strike levels for some time. However, I'm not sure the striking writers win. That seems to assume that the same writers who are on top of the TV business now are the ones who would have naturally risen through the ranks of the Internet.

I suspect what's going to happen is similar to the web. The VC money will pour into a lot of poorly conceived ventures. The infrastructure will get built out as a result. Habits won't change quickly enough to sustain the numbers needed, and many of the first round of VC-funded programming will suck. The bubble will pop, but the infrastructure will survive and be exploited by the next round of entertainers who actually understand how to use the new medium.

The people really hurting are all the support personnel (Stage hands, makeup/hair, etc.) that are no longer working because the TV shows aren't being produced.

While I confess I don't exactly have my finger on the pulse of the American TV industry - I'm not even listening to the heartrate monitor - I don't believe that a small lull in some American programming is going to turn viewers en masse away from well-plotted, well-written, passably-acted TV series, and towards cats falling down stairs. Ok, so Internet video isn't just cats falling down stairs, but the attempts at 'serious' TV series I've seen announced for Internet-only broadcast are all straight from the gullet of Nathan Barley.

The Internet will kill the TV in the same way that TV killed the radio and the radio killed the book. They didn't, though they did shove the preceding innovation into the background a bit. People don't flock to hear Charles Dickens read his latest chapter anymore, but they still pick up books. The extended family doesn't gather round the radio to listen in respectful silence, but they still have it on in the car or while ironing or cooking. (I certainly do - the fact that I cook my pasta to the sound of pounding industrial music courtesy of Germany's R1Live via Internet, rather than Radio 4's Listen With Mother, is beside the point.)

Equally, it's almost certain that the programming schedule - kids at this hour, light entertainment at that hour, serious programming now, followed by the news - is going to be increasingly less respected, and far more people will watch what they want when they want. I can't quite believe that scheduled programming will completely disappear - if you want to watch a sports match live, there's only one time it'll start - but I do think that more people will watch TV in the same way I and probably a lot of other web-savvy people do, watching what we're really glued to as soon as it's broadcast, and filling up the spaces with on-demand stuff we can kind of take or leave.

WTH? "some of the most creative minds in the country?" Only a deranged person could think that about television writers. Perhaps either the author of that quote (1) watches nothing but network television and therefore has no basis for comparison, or (2) has never, ever watched any network television, and has no basis for comparison.

The entire reason for the writer's union's existence is that a blind, inebriated cabbage could write better material, so they unionize in order to limit job opportunities and drive up wages (same story as in most unions and associations).

My major surprise was in finding out that Faux News was still on the air, despite the strike! Darn those scabs!