With the writer’s strike more than a day in the making, we at TubeMogul are very interested in seeing whether there will be an impact on web video viewing. The 1988 strike lasted nearly six months and cost the industry nearly $500M, according to most reports. The WGA still feels scarred from the last contract, and isn’t likely to back down on its demand for revenue sharing from whichever sources become available. In the last agreement, VHS and DVD sales were the new medium, and media companies gave very little to writers for these sales because it was unknown whether much revenue would be driven from these sources. The writers got burned.
We’re facing a new medium with the internet. But as Scott Collins of the LA Times notes, the web “is the one obvious difference between now and ’88.†The web isn’t just a new medium; now the medium changes the control over what content is available and how it’s distributed – it’s not controlled solely by the media companies. In addition, a great deal of video content is already available through this channel. Could this spur more writers to creating content for the web? Collins and others state that the WGA’s position on such work is “murky.†It will be interesting to see whether writers will focus their creative talents in this direction.
Also, this event could be a catalyst to move even more video viewers over to the internet for their fix of episodic entertainment. We know the train has left the station… will this event accelerate audience behavior even faster??
We at TubeMogul will be watching!
