 |
| Rehearsal: Musical guest Soulja Boy practices for 'Last Call with Carson Daly," on an outdoor stage in Burbank, Calif., before
the Writers Guild of America pickters arrived to protest as the WGA strike against motion picture and television producers
continued in this Nov. 29 photo. The Daly show was to become the first late-night talk show to defy the writers strike and
resume production. Reed Saxon |
Writers' strike: As reruns take over television, eyes shift to new media
As the Hollywood screenwriters' strike stretches into its fifth week, viewers, networks, and content creators all look to alternative outlets for fresh entertainment. Will they ever go back to mainstream media?
from the December 3, 2007 edition
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"We have a situation in which millions of people have an extra one to two hours on their hands with no new TV shows, and so they are saying, 'What do I do with that time?' " says Russell Zack, vice president of products for Anystream, a company with 700 media clients in 40 countries, including CNN, ESPN, Fox News, MTV Networks, and The Reuters Group. "So they are checking out this world of podcasts, social networks, webisodes, video blogs, and all the rest. Just like they did with episodic TV, many will get hooked by new options they never knew about."
The role of new media is at the heart of the strikers' demands, many observers note.
"It is quite ironic that the biggest beneficiary of the strike right now is the very thing they're striking over," says Jen Grogono, cofounder and chief content officer of ON Networks, an online video site based in Austin, Texas.
The strike has provided a window of opportunity for writers, a number of whom have approached her, looking for more satisfying creative work than writing quippy picket signs, she says. More than just another writing job, the site offers people a new creative challenge, she says.
"TV writers are accustomed to the tight restrictions of broadcast writing," says Ms. Grogono, "but they can try all sorts of new things online. There are no time or space restrictions here."
Exactly how much of a push this strike is giving to new media is somewhat anecdotal at this stage, say most observers. Move Networks, a leading provider of digital media publishing and delivery, says it is capturing more than 100,000 new, unique streaming viewers each day – but it was doing so at that pace before the strike began.
But Mr. Spencer of Wizzard Media attributes the 13 percent jump in podcast downloads from his site between Nov. 6 and 12, the week post-strike negotiations began, directly to the strike.
"We can't find any other reason," says Spencer. "There is a particularly large spike between 11:30 and 12:30 every night when people realize that [David] Letterman [with "The Late Show"] and [Jay] Leno [with "The Tonight Show"] are in reruns, and they want something different."
Spencer's brother, David, a Baltimore-based Spanish teacher who produces an educational podcast from his basement, suggests that new viewers of new media will find quality in that world – and that many may warm to it and never go back to conventional television programming.
"The digital media world online will benefit because people will be surprised at how much quality there is, how far the technology has come, and how much variety there is," says David Spencer.
The brothers add that the producers should take note: The two of them split the $7,200 that 200,000-plus viewers helped to generate in advertising sales this month.
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