The New Creativity
The studios have said union demands for higher residuals on DVDs and Internet downloads would stifle growth at a time of rising production costs, tighter profits and piracy. They insist digital distribution of movies and TV remains largely experimental or promotional and new media is just developing.
Hollywood writers call Monday strike: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
Where to begin?
First of all, I guess I just refuse to believe that executives in studios don’t have any plans for new methods of distribution of their content. They’re supposed to be experts in entertainment, right? What has prevented them from capitalizing on this “new Internet thing” for the last ten years?
Their old circa 1950 business model isn’t viable anymore and it isn’t the fault of the writers. So far the most creative industry in the world hasn’t been able to find a way to solve this problem, short of sending out C&D letters and suing people. Today the core competency of the entertainment industry is litigation, and they’re proving it every day. They haven’t really innovated in decades — every improvement in television viewing for example has come from outside the studios. TiVo pioneered DVRs and re-invented time-shifting, for example. The writers are right to get compensated for what is surely coming at any moment, and they know full well the studios can’t really be this ignorant.
Of course they have plans for distribution. They have to. But the writers got screwed on the DVD issue and so they are sticking to their guns on this one. A couple more pennies on the DVD sales, and a chunk of whatever further distribution mechanisms that the studios come up with for the Internet. That’s fair.
A lot of Hollywood woes get blamed on Piracy, but I think the real problem is that the studios refuse to embrace the technology and instead invest millions (billions?) of dollars in ways to avoid it, skirt it, and to protect themselves from it. If they would just redirect that money into actually investing in their own industry they probably wouldn’t have to worry about not being able to pay their writers.
If digital distribution is so experimental, why are cable companies, Apple, and others doing well with it?