posted
While ago I signed up for the beta of hulu.com. I had pretty low hopes for the website after trying to watch online shows on NBC.com and Fox.com. Well...I was wrong. I can't believe I'm saying this but I love the site. It's easy, quick...and has a pretty good selection of new and old shows plaus a few movies thrown in for good measure. Heroes, Firefle, Buffy, Battlestar Galatica new and old, Arrested Development, even Exosquad for heavens sake. I might even watch firefly now . It's making me wich Viacom, Time Warner and Disney would join in, that would cover about 90% of whats on tv these days. Is it a Youtube killer? No. Youtube is a different beast entirely.
Which brings up the problem. Each show has little 15 second commercial clips interspersed throughout the show or clip you're watching. Clearly someone is paying for these clips. So money is being made. And each video links you to places to buy each episode on DVD or buy it on itunes, additional revenue streams where the writers aren't getting their fair share.
So on the one hand I love the site. On the other I'd love it more if everyone got paid.
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However, I'd like to point that the people who wrote the stories for the episodes that currently appear on the site were compensated for their work and weren't creating such work under a contract that would allow them to receive compensation from this type of distribution.
So enjoy hulu.com guilt free for now. In three, four or six months, however....
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I also doubt that three commercials by one sponsor brings in a heck of a lot of money (relatively speaking, of course).
And as much as I've liked watching a couple of epsiodes of the Simpsons and Family Guy that I've missed, I can't see watching live action shows in the same format.
I do have to give hulu props for having a player that actually works with Linux.
And after experiencing it, I do have a bit more sympathy for the networks. Things are very strange right now. You can watch shows live, record them (Tivo, dvr and video tapes*), torrent them, view clips on YouTube!, view entire episodes and clips on legal streaming sites (like hulu), buy the DVD sets, rent the DVD sets from Netflix and Blockbuster, buy episodes from iTunes and other legal download sites, view on demand or pay-per-view from your cable/satellite co.
It's a serious mess.
*Yes, I still do this. I'm cheap.
Posts: 3423 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
In three, four, or six years it will be trivially easy to stream video from the web and pop up it on your big screen TV. It can be done fairly easily now, but technophobes (like myself) are wary of the different hookups required.
And it is true that the writers' contracts were not written to include this. I don't see that as an ethical OK to let it slide or permit the networks from benefitting from a loophole, however. The writers were promised payment for rebroadcast and that's what this is, even if it is in a different medium.
I have a Hulu membership. I activated it a few weeks back and wrote them a nice note telling them how impressed I was by their site and how happy I'd be to come back to it after writers were fairly compensated for their work on it.
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
"You can watch shows live (for which the networks make money), record them (Tivo, dvr and video tapes*) (for which the networks make money), torrent them, view clips on YouTube!, view entire episodes and clips on legal streaming sites (like hulu) (for which the networks make money), buy the DVD sets (for which the networks make money), rent the DVD sets from Netflix and Blockbuster (for which the networks make money), buy episodes from iTunes and other legal download sites (for which the networks make money), view on demand or pay-per-view from your cable/satellite co (for which the networks make money)."
Not seeing the problem. More ways to get the content is a good thing, as it opens up the market. But if the networks make money, the writers/actors/directors/crew should be receiving their tiny slice every time. Simple as that.
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
I said I have a little more sympathy for the networks. It's true. They're struggling to figure out where the audience is going to go and how to monetize various distribution systems without killing their existent revenue streams. It's a vexing problem. One compounded by all the competing ways to deliver content.
Now just because I have sympathy for where they're at doesn't mean that I support the way they're treating the writers. I don't. Writers should get a cut of DVD sales and Internet downloading/streaming.
And I have no faith that we're going to transition to a model that will seriously benefit consumers.
I am most worried that we're going to end up with a system where someone who supports the free + advertising model [e.g. me. I have no desire to pay for subscriptions or individual episodes/series] is left out of the equation. I'm willing to donate my time and mindshare for entertaining content. I'm less willing to pry open my tiny wallet.
quote:And it is true that the writers' contracts were not written to include this. I don't see that as an ethical OK to let it slide or permit the networks from benefiting from a loophole, however. The writers were promised payment for rebroadcast and that's what this is, even if it is in a different medium.
I support the writers getting a cut of Internet streaming. But I'm not going to boycott content that I wasn't able to watch live or tape and so choose instead to watch on the Internet.
Of course, since almost all of the episodes of the shows I watch are now burned off because of the strike, I won't be visiting hulu again anyway. I also won't be watching any of the older shows -- I think the rebroadcast case is much stronger with those.
Posts: 3423 | Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:I don't see that as an ethical OK to let it slide or permit the networks from benefiting from a loophole, however.
It's not a loophole. It's a contract that assigned certain rights to the writers and reserved the remaining rights for the production companies. The writers were represented by counsel when they negotiated the last contract. They made several demands and agreed to a long-term contract at a time when any IP lawyer had just received serious warning that neglecting to account for new media types was a dangerous thing to do in a contract.
Now, it's possible that the networks' interpretation of the contract is not the correct one. There's a pretty reliable mechanism for challenging their interpretation, and if they have a case, they should pursue legal action on the old contract.
I'm in favor of the strike in the sense that I favor freely negotiated contracts. But I don't think they have a normative case that they are due their demands. There's no sense that the sides are so unequal that I need to favor an outcome other than what the two sides bargain for.
And I certainly don't think it's unethical to expect the writers to live up to their previous contract, assuming it is being correctly interpreted.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
I agree that not allowing for new media futures was a mistake, but at the time the last contract was signed -- 22 years ago, when the World Wide Web was still the text-based ARPANET, FidoNet, etc, 6 years before Berners-Lee would invent the web page, nearly a couple of decades before video was put online -- the big fight was for percentages of this new thing: video sales. The WGA took a misguided bath on those percentages because the AMPTP pleaded overhead costs, the need to keep prices down so as not to kill this new fledgling industry, and the promise (sadly, not in writing) that the deal would be revisited once the economic realities of videos were figured out. Although writers receive 2.5% of licensing fees for rebroadcast (residuals), they agreed to accept only .03% of the income from video. Later this figure also was used for DVD sales, even though the overhead for producing and distributing DVDs was markedly less. Somehow the AMPTP never quite got around to figuring out those economics; that percentage never went up, even as profits soared.
Which is one reason why the writers aren't backing down now. They've heard all these arguments before, and they were dumb enough to believe them the first time.
Obviously, I do think the WGA's side is (mostly) the one in the right, and the way the AMPTP is handling the situation, while perfectly legal, is making me lose whatever respect I had for the companies involved.
Entertainment lawyer Johnathan Handel has created what I think is a pretty comprehensive examination of the different offers and provides what looks like a fair compromise here.
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
"Loophole" is the wrong term, I guess. How about "weaseling out"?
As I see it, the studios agreed to pay the writers a percentage based on the rebroadcast of their work. The studios now have discovered a way to rebroadcast that work in a different direction and profit from it while lessening the amount of traditional rebroadcasting. A good business model for the studios, but future economic hardship for the writers and ultimately lousy TV for the rest of us.
In a free market, the AMPTP is, of course, right to follow what they believe will maximize their profits. I understand that and support it. However, the nature of writing for television and movies means that writers get occasional big paydays and lots of lean months in between when they rely on residual checks to get by.
Residuals came about because studios starting making most of their money from reruns and the writers (and stars, and directors) started asking for more upfront money since their work was clearly valuable. The studios argued that since most shows failed, that wouldn't work for them, so the result was that the writers and actors and directors would take less upfront money and earn residuals instead. If the show made money, they made money. If the show didn't, they didn't. And many writers got through lean times because of previous works they had done that were still showing profits and generating residuals.
Take the residuals away and we'll be left with a very few high profile "star" writers who can negotiate their own deals, and a great many McWriters who will work for whatever minimum wage the AMPTP offers. The middle class writers will move on to work that pays more regularly, and we'll lose a lot of quality entertainment.
An equivalent might be if OSC's publishers decided to post his work online for free, on ad-supported pages, without paying him any royalties. They would still make money from his work but he would not. It's not an exact comparison, since reading books online is not threatening physical books while streaming video could very soon become the favored method of receiving video, but the general idea is the same.
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It looks like one or more studios are going to negotiate with the writers independently. I anticipate all the studios settling in short order once one does.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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As for OSC's publisher, authors have been much better about getting good contracts that protect their rights, so it is unlikely the publisher would be allowed to do this. Part of the reason for this is because there isn't a union, so changes in industry practices can be quickly responded to in some contracts in various ways, and if the people negotiating those contracts receive benefit, other people negotiate similar contracts.
I am not exactly anti-union for the WGA, but it is not at all clear to me that it has been a net benefit. It is easy to point to things it has gotten for the writers, but it is often easy to point to non-unionized people in similar fields who enjoy the same things.
I dispute the description of the situation projected as arising without the WGA. While star writers would certainly negotiate their own deals, that happens now. And even in highly competitive, hard to make a living on it fields such as book writing, authors who write books rarely work for McWages, and in particular tend to retain many rights to the use of their works, and/or receive a percentage of the income derived from the uses the publisher is able to put their book to.
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posted
Actually, very, very few novelists are fortunate enough to live solely on writing. And all of them have been helped by writers' organizations such as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which has helped writers deal with unscrupulous publishers and disseminated information to make it easier for writers to get fair deals.
I'm not pro-union, per se. In many cases unions have grown to become the same sorts of bureaucratic power-mad messes they originally sought to fight against. But the plight of the average writer in the entertainment industry is well-known enough to have become a cliche, and I hate seeing that attitude institutionalized.
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posted
I have nothing against professional organizations. I question the benefit of collective bargaining for television writers.
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posted
The writers will get what they are asking when access to online content is able to be controlled. That means this strike is on a collision course (and probably not unintentionally by the powers that be) with Net Neutrality. It's actually kind of impressive to me -- the RIAA had to drown Napster's free file sharing, but the public will be begging for the end of Net Neutrality if this strike keeps going.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:The writers will get what they are asking when access to online content is able to be controlled. That means this strike is on a collision course (and probably not unintentionally by the powers that be) with Net Neutrality
Control of access to online content in the context of the writer's strike is irrelevant to net neutrality. In fact, ending net neutrality (to the extent it exists now) would raise the costs to content providers of providing content online. This would lower the amount of profit from online distribution.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
I thought the throttling of Bit Torrent was a Net Neutrality issue. Of course it won't be called Net Neutrality when people start trying to figure out the resolution to this strike.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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It is. But throttling of online providers of content is also a net neutrality issue. For example, Verizon wants to be able to charge Google extra whenever a paying Verizon Internet customer watches a video on YouTube.
The bit torrent issue is a very small piece of the net neutrality debate, and not the one where significant money is at stake.
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. It's making me wich Viacom, Time Warner and Disney would join in, that would cover about 90% of whats on tv these days. Is it a Youtube killer? No. Youtube is a different beast entirely.
