The writers stike......

mister pc said
The writers are demanding a portion of profits from internet sales and the parent companies dont want to give it to them. I can certainly understand where the writers are coming from, especially considering the internet will soon displace broadcast television as the distribution medium. The networks need to just come to terms with the writers and give them a fair deal already, otherwise they are going to lose a lot more revenue than the writers contract demands would cost.

I agree the writers demands are fair but who do you think is going to cave first? Writers or the multiBILLION dollar companies they are fighting against. Hmmmmmmm....

On top of that the networks are actually pleased with this strike. Why? well lets let Bill Simmons explain:

"Actually, the studios have no incentive to settle until they have to start figuring out the summer movie schedule for 2009. Even though this was always the case, the WGA chose to strike in November and allowed the networks to extricate themselves from every bad development deal and half-assed pilot they had. Check out Alec Baldwin's recent piece on the Huffington Post. Hollywood LOVES this strike -- the execs are using it as an opportunity to completely re-invent the TV infrastructure. Imagine if the NBA had a chance to dump every bad player's contract, avoid paying any front-office employees, disband its five worst franchises with no repercussions and fix everything that's wrong about the league, and on top of that, they could get by on reruns, D-League games and documentaries for the next nine months without antagonizing their fans, getting crushed financially or suffering catastrophic dips in ratings or attendance. Would they do it? Of course, they would. Why didn't the WGA leaders see this in October when they were threatening to strike? I don't know.) "

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/links/080103