Tim Oren took this away from the BlogWorld convention held in Las Vegas:
I have seen the future of media, and it is low rent. Those big booths at the Cable Show and other mass media conclaves are made possible by high margins, which are in turn enabled by a stranglehold over distribution. What I saw in Vegas is competing effectively for part of that audience, distribution and hence margins. BlogWorld will never really look like a Cable Show, and the latter will never go away. But everything about the old media, from brands to margins and audience is at threat of being corroded by the participants in this little show.
I don’t know what Tim knows about media but he knows something about money—he’s a venture capitalist.
Now relate this to the WGA Hollywood writer’s strike that’s going on right now. As I understand it the writers are arguing for a bigger share (any share, actually) of the Internet distribution pie. Does anyone know what the actual numbers involved are? Are there margins there to share?
It’s my understanding that a lot of the internet stuff does not make money for the studies. For example, I think episodes of Lost were available on-line at no cost with no advertising. The studios claim that this was promotional use to catch people up with the show (makes sense for that show), but other recent TV programming available on the internet is preceded and interrupted by commercials, but the studios still claim the whole package is promotional (the advertisements pay the download costs).
I think writers fear the emerging internet infrastructure more than what exists now and particularly the incentives for such a structure if writers don’t have to be paid. Right now there are no TV reruns of Lost, so arguably its writers are getting paid less to write the show than writers in the past.
I didn’t realize that a Lost writer had a write-up in yesterday’s NYTimes:
“My show, ‘Lost,’ has been streamed hundreds of millions of times since it was made available on ABC’s Web site. The downloads require the viewer to first watch an advertisement, from which the network obviously generates some income. The writers of the episodes get nothing. We’re also a hit on iTunes (where shows are sold for $1.99 each). Again, we get nothing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11lindelof.html?ex=1352437200&en=88dae6ebc6bf1ebf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss