Ugh

Oh dear, it looks like the strike is going to go on and on.

I'm sad about it, and angry, but there's also something sort of absurd and funny about the way it's playing out.

The kind of people who run the studios are so unbelievably rich, and so unbelievably out of touch, that their posturing has a weird, funny element to it, as if someone shipped in some 1920s robber barons to negotiate with people who actually live right now.

Most of my interaction with studio execs have been with lower-level guys. They wear suits, and one gets the feeling that they have to have their assistants log them into their AOL accounts that they signed up for back in 1997.

In one memorable meeting, we were discussing strategies for the NBC website, and one of them said to me, 'Ok, Wendy, now what would make people come to NBC.com instead of, say, CBS.com?"

And I said, and I think I'm right, the internet isn't about INSTEAD, it's about IN ADDITION TO. People who are on the internet all day (ahem, me) can visit a seemingly infinite number of sites, and visit them again and again, and the problem with how old media conceives of the internet is that they think of it like TV in 1985. Like, I'll either watch Webster OR Facts Of Life, but not both. (P.S., Facts Of Life all the way.)

I think to a large degree this kind of misunderstanding about the web is what will kill old media outright if they aren't careful. As everyone has already whispered, eventually writers will be able to take their products directly to the web, launch it through one of the major video providers (like iTunes) and then release one-a-week. People will use their Apple TV or other device to sling it onto their big screens, and that'll be it. And bye bye big studios. Of course, that means that the Apples of the world would become the new studios (here comes the new boss...), but at least the studios would understand the internet.

The reason the instead/in addition to model really matters, though, is because once you remove the time element from viewing (even a dvr can only record a couple things at once, and getting a dvd takes effort, whereas the internet is always there) then the competition model that the networks have operated on goes right out the window. In essence, then, networks will have to make ONLY good shows, because they will no longer be able to be the strongest just at a certain time, but strong compared to the entire field out there.

As it stands now, I think the moguls are banking on the writers being as clueless as they are about online content. They may spend most of their days fighting endangered tigers that their assistants smuggled into the country for them, and dining on solid-gold steaks, but the rest of us losers are wasting our time reading Perez Hilton and watching Funny or Die and hating ourselves for knowing who Julia Allison and Jakob lodwick EVEN ARE. It's hilarious that networks are saying that internet streams of shows "promote" the shows when they air on TV. If anything, it's the opposite. Or, you know, not yet, but it will be.

The networks aren't being victimized by greedy writers, they're lucky the writers aren't walking away entirely. Remember radio guys? Yeah, that's you.