What the Writers Won

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-29-what-writers-won-wga/



The end of the five-month Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike was the most important thing that’s happened in Hollywood in a while, but another important development has been largely overlooked. Amazon has announced that it would start running ads in Prime Video series and movies, which viewers can escape by purchasing a more expensive “ad-free” tier.

With Amazon’s move, pretty much every streaming service now has at least one tier with advertising, from Netflix to Max to Hulu to Peacock to Disney+. It’s just one way in which the streaming model, which has lost enormous amounts of money for virtually every company that has tried it, is slowly but surely turning back into traditional television. Cable companies are also now replacing the TV bundle, where they sold a collection of channels at one price, with a streaming bundle, where streaming networks are tied together at one price.

It’s realistic to expect that, in a few years, TV customers will have a streaming bill instead of a cable bill, one that will cost about the same to watch the same shows littered with the same ads. It makes sense for consumers who are overwhelmed with different charges for different streaming networks. And it makes sense for the networks to combine “carriage” revenue, which used to come from the cable companies that distributed their channels, with advertising revenue.

The writers were on strike because the actual entertainment creators were poised to become the only ones to lose out in this transition. As I wrote when the strike began in May, entertainment writing over the past decade has shifted to a gig-economy model, making it next to impossible to earn a living. This was a function of streaming video popping up as a “new” distribution channel, unrestricted by the contractual agreements of broadcast and cable.

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