What's to stop the actors or writers from simply making their own content?
It made sense to me when you had terrestrial television stations with actual monopolies over broadcast rights.
But now with the internet they have many vectors to share and market their content.
So you won't be on NBC or Netflix or whatever, so what, post it on Twitter and YouTube. If they move to alternative distribution platforms and the studios don't do anything then the studios will lose their audience and thus their revenues.
Some of the best content I've encountered is exactly this. A good example is "High Maintenance", which started as a Vimeo web series and cost $1000 / episode to produce. [1] Another example is Christopher Nolan's first film, "Following", which cost $6,000 to produce. "El Mariachi" by Robert Rodriguez famously had a $7,000 budget.
They could also pool their money, crowdfund, or otherwise shoot for a bigger budget, in which case they could mimic the first Coen Brothers movie, "Blood Simple", which had a $1.5 million budget. There's also "The Blair Witch Project" ($200k), "Clerks" ($230k), "Paranormal Activity" ($15k), etc. [3]
I truly hope this latest labor dispute causes an industry shift in the direction of creatives taking more control over production and distribution of their content. Musician Anton Newcombe said this about the recording industry, and I think it applies equally well to film studios:
"...it’s a mafia. And until they can write the letter that I’m writing, they are the postman, and I am the letter writer. Period. End of discussion."
Distribution, access to capital, a reliable track record, contracts or relationships with channels, etc. All the unglamorous parts of media.
There were some very cool things that came out of the last strike (like Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog) but I would guess that at least 75% of you have never heard of it.
IMO, it's because writers and actors form a seriously minor part of the labor needed to make a film or TV episode.
From VFX to catering, there's a lot of labor needed - much of which is highly specialized - that would cost too much to contract or develop independently.
> What's to stop the actors or writers from simply making their own content?
1) access to capital to cover the cost of production. $/min of a Mandalorian episode or even a late night comedy show is way above self funding capacity of most of the people employed as writers or actors.
2) critical mass providing leverage in distribution. It is very very cheap for Netflix to market just one more show, as compared with the costs of a new subscription service to try to acquire new customers. On the feature side, studios pay a lot less to be in theaters (as percentage of box office revenue) than indie films.
> So you won't be on NBC or Netflix or whatever, so what, post it on Twitter and YouTube.
It's not like people haven't been trying. But take any successful show in the last few years, it simply could not have made nearly the same audience or revenue on these platforms. The stuff you see there is already hyper optimized for these platforms - it'd be a very poor business decision to take a show with the production cost of TV or subscription services, and monetize it purely on these platforms.
> But take any successful show in the last few years, it simply could not have made nearly the same audience or revenue on these platforms. The stuff you see there is already hyper optimized for these platforms - it'd be a very poor business decision to take a show with the production cost of TV or subscription services, and monetize it purely on these platforms.
This is exactly it. There are tons of incredible series with high production values on YouTube created on shoestring budgets, but they mostly cater to very specific niches. They can succeed on YouTube because they aren't going for the broad appeal and hyper-consistent development cycle required for TV channels to pick them up. If such an ecosystem existed in the early 00s, some of these series probably would have been picked up and made incredibly successful to a much broader audience by channels like Discovery, History, or TLC, but falling cable subscriptions has resulted in massive consolidation diluting the original premises of these networks, thus forcing them to focus on more generalized content. (The 2007-2008 WGA strike certainly didn't help, but I think this was inevitable with the subsequent rise of streaming services - the strike just kickstarted the realityfication/enshittification of cable TV a couple years early.)
That's not to say that no YouTube series or YouTubers can make it on TV, but they have to fall into the niche of having broad appeal on YouTube without being limited to YouTube, and I think Drew Gooden made this point really well in his video covering Lilly Singh's late night show [0], which got off to a horrendous start because studio execs, blinded by the prospect of getting a popular YouTuber to make a show for them and (hopefully) get that YouTuber's audience to throw their eyeballs at it, did not attempt to create a show that worked for Lilly, but instead shoved Lilly into a tired formula which she floundered in. (Keep in mind that Lilly's core YouTube demographic would be sound asleep by the time each episode aired at 1:30 AM, and one wonders the kind of discussions that led to this show getting greenlit in the first place.)
In a way, though, we're already seeing lots of content which is hyper-optimized for streaming services that is paid for by the big studios - I remember seeing an interview with some writers for a show only available on Netflix (I think, and I wish I could remember anything more specific) who remarked that with broadcast shows, you had to fit everything neatly into very specific timeslots, and that each timeslot had to have a hook to keep you sticking around after the commercial break, but when you're writing for a streaming platform, all those considerations just go out the window, allowing for much easier and more natural storytelling, like a movie.
Of course, you could still air these shows on TV, but they wouldn't work as well on TV as, much like movies that get chopped up for broadcast, very rarely do you have good hooks before commercial breaks. In addition, many shows made for streaming services do not follow the standard 18-22/37-42 minute show length, which means you have to either insert a ton of ads to pad the runtime into a 30/60/90 minute timeslot or have an odd lineup until you can get to some other oddball-length show (or until the infomercials begin).
>What's to stop the actors or writers from simply making their own content?
At this point, I would think the union. I have a family member in Equity that couldn't play in his own productions because he couldn't afford to pay himself. Sounds like a joke, but it's true.
It made sense to me when you had terrestrial television stations with actual monopolies over broadcast rights.
But now with the internet they have many vectors to share and market their content.
So you won't be on NBC or Netflix or whatever, so what, post it on Twitter and YouTube. If they move to alternative distribution platforms and the studios don't do anything then the studios will lose their audience and thus their revenues.