WGA, SAG, DGA, and Silicon Valley: New Media.

[SirNitram]

Link

Forget Warner Brothers, Universal and Disney. Say goodnight and good luck to CBS, NBC and Fox. The Hollywood studio model is about to be turned upside down.

Leading film and TV writers, accompanied by actors, directors and Silicon Valley investors, are poised to announce the creation of new ventures aimed at bypassing the studios.

"It's a whole new model to bring content directly to the masses," said screenwriter Aaron Mendelsohn. "We're gathering together a team of A-list TV and film writers, along with their A-list equivalent from Silicon Valley."

Mendelsohn is not alone. Seven groups are thought to be working on forming companies to challenge the dominance of the studios. The new companies plan to create programmes and films and distribute them via the internet, circumventing the old model of big studios owned by even bigger parent companies churning out content and controlling when and where it is seen.

The developments come as the screenwriters' strike shows no sign of a resolution. A report presented last week to a city council committee estimated that the strike would cost Los Angeles between $380m and $2.5bn (£190m to £1.25bn).

As the two sides in the dispute - the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers - trade insults, one perhaps unintended consequence of the standoff is that the people who make the programmes and films have seen that they can get their message out without the help of the studios.

"The strike videos confirmed that you can create content directly for the internet and find an audience," said director and writer George Hickenlooper, who has made a series of short films in support of the writers.

Those films, under the title Speechless, have featured big stars - from cinema great Woody Allen to TV personalities such as Jay Leno - and attracted big audiences on the internet.

Some of those involved have even said that when they are next out of contract they may go straight to the internet, taking advantage of services such as Google Video or YouTube, to bypass the studios altogether.

Some big TV names, including Leno, are already subtly shifting the way their programmes are made. Worldwide Pants, late-night talkshow host David Letterman's production company, is in talks with the union to allow it to return to screens with a script in early January.

Other late nighters are expected to return - some without writers - in the first week of the new year. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is due back a week later, again without writers.

But doing his heavily scripted programme without a script is the least of Stewart's problems. He is hosting the Oscar ceremony in February, an event that could fall foul of the strike.

The Golden Globes ceremony, due to take place in mid-January, is already shrouded in uncertainty: the union has refused the event a waiver and writers are promising to picket the red carpet.

Will nominated stars such as George Clooney dare to cross a picket line? Will the event be cancelled? What about the parties?

The irony for the writers involved in setting up the new ventures is that at the core of the current dispute is the question of how to reimburse writers for work that is distributed on the internet.

The studios say that it is still too early to say if the internet will generate income to be shared with the writers. The writers counter that the studios crow to Wall Street about the profits to be made from the digital sector.

"The internet is a place where they can't maintain control," he said. "They are trying to introduce an old-school control-orientated way of thinking into a system that rejects and repels that tradition of control."

The hi-tech community, he notes, is more comfortable with the notion of relinquishing control over its investments.

"It's a different model," he says. "They really believe in the free and open source software movement; a sharing, egalitarian system."

Hickenlooper is also teaming up with a high-tech entrepreneur, in this case Jordan Mechner, who created the Prince of Persia videogame. One of their first projects is a feature film released in daily segments.

"We're doing low-budget content that will be distributed on a daily basis through the internet," he said. "The idea is to use A-list talent. It's not George Clooney but it's names we know." The film will be released over a month or 50 days and subsequently released in its entirety on DVD.

The notion of the creatives taking control of the means of production is not a new one to Hollywood. United Artists started, as its name suggests, as just that, an effort by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, DW Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks. But that effort ended in rancour and disorganisation, and the vision was eventually swallowed up by a series of corporate mergers. Last year Tom Cruise and his producer Paula Wagner took over the moribund studio.

"The launching pad of United Artists is a nice inspiration for us," said Mendelsohn. "But having Tom Cruise own us in 70 years' time is not part of our game plan."

For the simple fact they're deciding to produce more stuff rather than sit on their duffs, waiting for the studios to come back to the negotiating table someday(For those not aware, the current gridlock is because the studios left 22 days ago, and most attempts for smaller groups of writers to negotiate with smaller parts of studios have hit the studios united front with a splatter noise), I'm happy with this.

[Durandal]

The Valley would be more than happy to help writers create content that is free from studio shackles. Having to deal with Hollywood's insane demands for DRM and total disregard for the consumer's buying experience costs tech companies a whole lot of money and is a ball and chain on progress in general.

[The Yosemite Bear]

hehheheheheheeheh

yes teach the robber barons that they need to go the way of the dinosaur...

goodbye big media monopolies, fox and sony bmg, may you be the first against the walls once the internet revolution gets started.

[Lord Poe]

Bypassing the studios?

Hello, people. George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola beat you to it decades ago.

[CmdrWilkens]

Bypassing the studios?

Hello, people. George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola beat you to it decades ago.

Yet they still had to go through the studio's for distribution which is the one big change that we are seeing know. Nowadays you can honestly look at the possibility of streaming commercial TV/Movies in some way to an audience bypassing the entrie studio distribution monster. In an era when any decent company could mass produce DVD's once a viable master copy is put together by a halfway decent studio the ONLY difference between the big guy and the little guy is the talent and content they can afford. With the current strike it should at least give the little guys a chance to procure viable talent especially on the writing side so it becomes lastly only a matter of financial resources which the tech companies would love to front if they stand to position themselves as the new owners of the content distribution channels for the next 50 years or so.

[Lord Poe]

Yet they still had to go through the studio's for distribution which is the one big change that we are seeing know. Nowadays you can honestly look at the possibility of streaming commercial TV/Movies in some way to an audience bypassing the entrie studio distribution monster. In an era when any decent company could mass produce DVD's once a viable master copy is put together by a halfway decent studio the ONLY difference between the big guy and the little guy is the talent and content they can afford. With the current strike it should at least give the little guys a chance to procure viable talent especially on the writing side so it becomes lastly only a matter of financial resources which the tech companies would love to front if they stand to position themselves as the new owners of the content distribution channels for the next 50 years or so.

Ah, don't forget what a visionary Lucas is. He actually predicted things like Youtube, and has been talking of "beaming" movies to theatres from Skywalker Ranch since before TPM. He's frustrated because movie theatres haven't gone digital as fast as he hoped.

[Admiral Valdemar]

We all know the problems he had with Episode I and II being shown in non-super duper digital cinemas.

I don't doubt the Internet is the future of digital media transmission. I doubt that it can cope with this future when we're having problems with traffic from video sites like YouTube and server space and bandwidth. HD movies streaming over the web to all and sundry isn't going to happen any time soon, not without a lot of money.

[ray245]

Not to mention a monitor is usually smaller than a HDTV.

[Natorgator]

There is also the problem of whether this model will actually generate enough business for advertisers to want to support it. If it's not making the advertisers money, it will fail.

There's that, and the fact that people still want to be able to watch TV on their televisions. I know I do.

[Meest]

If we start getting Japan level bandwidth/prices soon HD streaming is viable. Though I love the idea of finally getting an accurate and real ratings system.

[Resinence]

Not to mention a monitor is usually smaller than a HDTV.

Any LCD capable of 1280x1024 can play "HD" movie files and HD TV just fine, size isn't really a problem, nor is resolution (computer monitors have been ahead of TV's for years).

[Uraniun235]

If we start getting Japan level bandwidth/prices soon HD streaming is viable.

I don't think we necessarily need HD streaming in realtime; just buffer about half the video file, then start playback while the other half continues to download.

There's that, and the fact that people still want to be able to watch TV on their televisions. I know I do.

That's not an issue at all; this sort of service would assuredly generate demand for a set-top semi-idiot-proof box which can connect to Internet video sources and display them on a TV. There are already products which allow for computers to serve in this capacity. Internet video does not mean we're all doomed to watching TV on our desktop. What it could mean is the death of the movie theater, however, since theaters today survive largely by being the first to show movies.

[CmdrWilkens]

There is also the problem of whether this model will actually generate enough business for advertisers to want to support it. If it's not making the advertisers money, it will fail.

There's that, and the fact that people still want to be able to watch TV on their televisions. I know I do.

Which is where we get into the era, long hyped but certianly possible, of a completely integrated home electronics suite where the PC serves as the processing point distributing "TV" to the Television outlets, Phone service to the phone jacks and then your typcial computer applicaitons to the desktop display.

Honestly aside from the prgoramming side of things there is nothing preventing someone from setting up a server which is the sole input point for every data device in the house. I can, right now, wire my phone and cable into a computer and have it spit one output to my TV, a second output to my monitor, another to my phone. The problem only resides in controlling and cabling this all effectively. Right now its more efficient for me to run my PC in one room, ignore the phone and stick with cellphones, and then have the TV in another room. The point is that right now the only data line I have in the house is the cable and it is capable of giving me the full channel lineup plus run both my wifes and my computer's at the same time. The worry is not so much with the end user bandwidth as commercial cable/fiber optic while expensive is certainly becoming available with good enough bandwidth. The problem comes with 300m users trying to do the same thing and with content producers still principally clustered in LA and New York this creates huges bottlenecks at the backbone lines transiting out of those cities.

[Uraniun235]

Bottlenecks at LA and NYC aren't really that big a problem, they'd certainly have multiple distribution nodes throughout the country. A guy in Texas wouldn't be pulling Law And Order from NYC, he'd be pulling it from a node in Houston.

[Netko]

The basic problem is that currently there doesn't exist an universal platform which would allow the display of internet video using a standard from multiple sources on a dumbed down set-top box. You have a bunch of different platforms; YouTube, iTunes, Joost, the various TV station ones, cable provider PPV's, etc. and so on. The closest thing to an integrated dumbed-down platform acceptable in the living room is MS's Live Marketplace on the XBOX 360, but there you're still limited to deals MS made with content producers. We're simply at a point where somebody needs to write a good standard similar to RSS (or an standardized adoption of RSS), which allows a dumb box that can parse it direct access to streaming videos without having to load the page its hosted at and that standard needs to be very widely accepted, especially by the current big content producers (they can embed commercials in the stream - the standard must be flexible about that). Once that happens, Internet TV can really take off. Until then , all such initiatives will have major issues getting wide viewership because of platform fragmentation necessitating a PC to parse webpages (Youtube and the like) or native applications (Joost, etc.).