Striking Fans

The writers’ strike could be as destructive to TV viewership as the Baseball strike was to it’s fan base. One perspective from YouLicense blog:

A top industry consultant divulged an interesting theory to me. The WGA’s last big strike took place in 1988. It revolved around residuals for hour-long shows along with reduced pay for reruns. Due to the five month strike, the big studios had to push the fall season to the winter. Leading soap operas had to employ low budget writers who had reduced the shows’ quality. It is said that 10% of the TV viewers stopped watching television forever!

To feed fearmongering, YouLicense speculates that this strike could shrink the audience 28%. Bad is bad.

Baseball needed steroids, the homerun record, interleague play, expanded playoffs, and a commissioner to organize the rebuilding effort. Perhaps writers can write better stories that they have in the past, or producers can produce higher quality content. Is that likely? In the face of low cost, non-written reality TV?

Maybe instead, Network TV, once distributing original content, will resume treating fans as either inconvenient or lawless. Perhaps Network TV hunkers down, and demands 1) watch the show on TV as scheduled, or 2) watch on the web on a DRMed and locked-down browser window, or 3) wait until the DVD is officially released a year after the end of the season and be prepared to pay higher prices.

Time-shift? We hate it. Skip commercials? We sue. Torrents? We prosecute.

There might be better models than selling a $1.99 version of each show the morning after it was broadcast. That model would have to provide shows that cost less and are easier to buy / watch.

Links to earlier comments on the Writers’ strike:
Strike That
Connecting A Dot
Fear (of) The Man

More from the YouLicense blog post:

The future of music 2.0
So what has this got to do with music licensing and YouLicense? Apparently a lot.
Music licensors have also been affected by this strike and are suffering considerable business loss. If there are no shows on TV, there are no 30K$ TV placements. But it’s the current strengthening of online television that will bring many new opportunities for musicians and personnel working in the music licensing arena. As Gerd Leonard, Music guru, so eloquently put in a previous post:
“10s of 1000s of new TV, online video, and gaming channels will be born in the next 2-3 years – and all of them will need music to go with the visuals. Millions of songs will be synched to video – this market will positively explode.”

I couldn’t agree more.