Writers Guild Strikes

It is official. The Hollywood Writers Guild is now on strike, which means new scripts for all scripted shows and movies have now been shelved until the dispute is resolved. This will hit television first, where daily scripted shows like The Tonight Show, The Colbert Report, and others won't have a writing staff. But it also will affect motion pictures as well.

The two major issues, as I understand them are:

1. Writers are still paid residuals on DVDs based on a "preliminary deal" designed back when they were an experimental, emerging medium. At the time, writers, actors, and directors agreed to take a much smaller residual than on VHS tapes in order to support the new format. Now that DVDs are virtually the entire market, they want them brought to parity. But studios want to keep the status quo in order to keep profits up in a time when illegal downloads are eating into the market.

2. Studios want to apply the same logic to downloadable shows that was applied to DVDs originally, since they are still an experimental emerging market. Writers feel burned by the DVD experience and want to ensure that they are not in the same place 10 years from now on the "downloadable issue.

Here is hoping both sides can come to an agreement quickly which is of benefit to both. If not, around January we may be seeing a flood of reruns and reality series, and shortly after theater chains may start to suffer from lack of content to bring in consumers.