Back

Of course the studios want to drag the writer's strike on for as long as they can afford to. It is the only way they can make writer's suffer.

But, more importantly, they want to project the idea that the writers need a paycheck more than the studios need writers. It's classic fearmongering.

"We'll ruin you. Our pockets are deeper. You'll run out first."

It's disgusting, and it's frustrating that so many otherwise progressive news organizations and publications parroted it without any deeper examination.

These organizations, in attempting to scoop a story about how evil these studios are, in fact participated in that evil. They brandished studio propaganda as fact.

Now, I don't have any inside track on the studios, and I don't currently work in the media industry, beyond the work I'm doing to destroy it with the power of community media production re: #NewEllijayTelevision #netv.

I don't *know* that the studios are scared, running out of money, and so desperate for the writers to take a deal that they would do basically anything, and that they are attempting to shift the narrative to make it seem like that is not the case in order to bluff at least some of the writers in to accepting a bad deal and returning to the table.

I don't Know that, but I strongly suspect it, and I've played poker often enough to know the kinds of hunches I can trust.

When I say that the current story in the news cycle about extending the strike until people go homeless feels like cheap fearmongering in support of a simple bluff, I'm basing that on years of studying workers movements, and examining previous media industry strikes.

For the studios, this is professional. For the writers, it is both professional and personal.

For the studios, it's about their bottom line. For the writers, it's about the roofs over their heads and the food on their tables.

This recent bit of fearmongering is about convincing the writers that they have more to lose that the studios.

Here's the thing, though, that's simply not true.

Studios absolutely depend on new movies and television shows to survive.

In this vertically integrated world of streaming services, this is because new content retains current subscriptions and attracts new ones.

These studios also have huge backlogs of content that they can depend on to generate some small amount of revenue. They can make endless remakes. They can reissue the same tired and staid movies and television shows again and again.

Eventually, these things run out, and the studios will have to start paying interest on their loans.

Netflix, for example, is probably in a hole too deep to climb out of.

I believe the studios are desperate and scared, and they want to make sure that the writers are too.

They will run out of money.

They will stop seeing new subscribers on their streaming platforms. They've been subsidizing the cost of developing those streaming platforms in order to capture an audience, but they don't get advertising revenue from their streaming platforms, and there's a limit to how many platforms anyone will subscribe to to begin with.

They have built an unsustainable business model on the back of an industry that is leaving them behind.

There's also the Physical Media aspect. Especially when they are relying on their backlog to make money, physical media comes in to play.

Physical media sales, and especially second hand physical media sales, don't come with recurring revenue (or, in the case of a bargain bin loss leader or a second hand purchase ANY revenue.)

Physical media sales are up something like 30% in the last 3 years, and that's just counting the stuff that actually gets counted. I sell used DVDs, bluray discs, and VHS tapes, and so do thousands of other people who's sales aren't being counted.

The physical media thing cuts in to recurring revenue across the board, but it's especially powerful with pre-HD TV releases because the 20 year old DVD you found for a dollar at the local thrift store is likely to be the best version of that original source material that'll ever be released.

The studios are trying to convince the writers, and the general public, that they have infinite wealth and that they can wait forever without producing any new material, that the writers are worthless.

They've concentrated the market to a near monopoly, and they are convinced that this gives them the ability to force writers to work for poverty wages for the thrill of writing.

But they took on huge amounts of debt to concentrate the market to this extent, and their shareholders expect a return on that investment which cannot come.

This is a sea change for the entertainment industry.

It is not unprecedented.

Radio had a similar moment in the middle of WWII, resulting in what is probably the longest strike in american history. I wrote about that some here: https://ajroach42.com/v-discs-music-from-the-longest-strike-in-american-history/ but kind of obliquely.

But even the motion picture industry has specifically and directly experienced this in the past.

First it was with the rise of television. Television forced the studios to contract, forced some studios to close, and resulted in the remaining studios making bigger and more lavish films, making a lot more films to compete with TV.

Then there was home video. The VHS tape resulted in a bunch of new entrants in to the film industry, and changed fundamentally the value proposition of making a film. In both cases, these things ultimately resulted in increase profits for the established players.

The rise of streaming services, as was just pointed out by @fifilamoura ( https://eldritch.cafe/@fifilamoura/110707210945466851 ) has resulted in pitting studios against the tech industry.

Over the last 30 years it has seemed as if the entertainment industry and the tech industry both had endless supplies of money.

But now we're watching the birth of the #communityMedia revolution, the #DIYTV revolution.

This is exactly the kind of thing that I've been writing about at https://communitymedia.network

See, tech companies have grown to enormous, impossible sizes. Media companies have grown to enormous impossible sizes. Their only option for continuing to exist is to continue to grow, but the world is changing around them, and there are no new realms for them to conquer.

At the same time, producing the kind of media that used to take tens of millions of dollars and teams of hundreds ...

I mean, it's not EASY to do it with a crew of five in a back yard, but it's possible.

The studios aren't really fighting with one another, they're fighting with youtube and twitch (even as youtube and twitch turn inward and cannibalize themselves in the face of falling profits.)

Dedicated people with more passion than sense can completely recreate the visual aesthetic sense of a television program from the 60s, or the 90s.

We can make Filmation quality animation using open source tools in 1/4 the time and effort, and with 1/10th the staff that Filmation did.

We can do Synchrovox style mouth movements using actual face tracking and animation using cheap software that is widely available (although I feel gross about using an adobe product, and I sincerely hope for an ethical alternative in the near future.)

Steven Soderbergh shot his recent films on an iPhone.

My little Sony point and shoot and DJI mini drone can deliver footage so Cinematic that it makes me reconsider the way I am producing media.

We have the technology.

I can spin up a streaming service built on peertube in an hour or two, publish a roku app and make it's content available on Kodi with a few keystrokes.

I cover the broad strokes in the Manual section of Community Media https://communitymedia.network/manual/

but if someone wants to sit down with me and help, I'm happy to write up a detailed guide to deploying peertube, setting up ffplayout, configuring a custom roku app, a custom settop box, and a Kodi setup.

You can do it hosted on commodity hardware from any cloud provider without breaking the bank. I recently moved us to larger hardware so that I can support more people on our services, but I was previously paying about $30/month for all of our infrastructure (now I'm up to $150/month, but I have enough headroom for 10+ live channels.)

We, right here on the fediverse, represent a bigger threat to the future of the established players in the entertainment industry than anything they have ever face before, and I'm not sure they've realized how big of a threat we are.

I don't expect that #communityMedia will supplant 100% of the established media players, Disney has too much money for that. Disney has more money than the christian church, and about as many worshipers.

But we can, for the first time really, provide a home grown, collectively owned and operated, community based alternative to the established players in major media.

Television and film are having a twitter/mastodon\\reddit/kbin moment, as (if you'll forgive a dated MTG reference) the studios burn their life points in an attempt to do damage to one another.

I fully support the striking writers, because all workers deserve fair, equitable, ethical compensation.

But I also support the striking writers because they are laying bare how fragile and desperate the industry is, and exposing the industry as the shambling corpse that it is.

I hope the writers are able to negotiate a fair contract that gives them the support and compensation they deserve, and I also hope that thousands of community run media production alternatives spring up to make sure these mega-corporations and their owners and shareholders never feel secure in threatening their workers ever again.

There are more of us than them.

The rest of what I have to say is less about the strike than it is about what we can do to wrestle power away from the media corporations that have been treating our collective culture as an exploitable resource.

I expect it will be slightly more controversial than "writers deserve to be paid."

It's like this,

Disney and Sony and paramount and Time/Warner/Max/Discovery/HBO and the rest of the small number of remaining film and television studios play an outsized role in our culture because they "own" what is effectively modern folklore.

We continue to go to them, to pay them, to support them, because they control the characters with which we have grown up.

If we're ever going to legitimately challenge them, we're going to have to create a new folklore canon that exists explicitly for public reuse.

I'm a big fan of CC-BY-SA for this, although it is a little more complicated than I'd like.

Basically, we have an opportunity to work together to create our own characters and our own stories that we can all collectively share and own and use without Disney or Fox or Sony or Discovery or Max or Paramount or whomever being involved.

And I believe that, more importantly than it being possible, it is neccisary for us to create works that explicitly encourage this kind of creative reuse and reinterpretation.

That's why I advocate for CC-BY-SA and not just CC-BY.

CC-BY-SA means "reuse this however you want! but also release your remix under the same terms."

I don't have a lot of faith in the legal system, especially in the US, to hold anyone accountable for violating the terms of a BY-SA license but I think it is a useful shorthand for "I encourage other people to adapt this work, as long as they play along."

The fact that it has a nonprofit and some lawyers behind it is helpful to give it an air of legal legitimacy that carries slightly more weight than me making the same statements without having them reviewed by a lawyer, but I think it is as valuable as a common shorthand than as a legal mechanism.

I expect a lot of people who believe that writers and actors and directors and producers should be paid a fair wage will look at this idea with suspicion, because it's hard to imagine a world in which people get paid fairly while giving things away.

I've seen it work. I know people who derive 100% of their income from the production and distribution of CC-BY or CC-BY-SA media.

I pay for a small production crew based entirely on voluntary subscriptions and advertising revenue. These people make a living wage making a small amount of media for local distribution, again all CC-BY-SA.

The trick is funding. That's the hard thing that we're all facing down as we try to create new ways of producing and distributing media.

I have built a streaming network that I can run for less than $100 a month in infrastructure costs that can support thousands or tens of thousands of concurrent viewers, but how do you get enough money to fund the creation of media when you can only reach a few tens of thousands of people?

That question is why I believe that funding is tricky, but I think I have an answer, and I'd like to explore it.

People deserve to be paid for the work that they do, and it's hard to do that fairly while also trying to bootstrap an alternative to a group of organizations that seem to have incredibly deep pockets and a huge backlog of historical content over which they own a monopoly.

But people still deserve to be paid fairly for their work.

So we have a handful of problems to resolve:

- funding media production
- funding distribution infrastructure
- helping people discover media that they might be interested in viewing.

We do this, right now. This isn't hypothetical.

Our media production and distribution is, at this point, entirely self funded.

We fund through merchandise sales (you've seen my t-shirts!) and zine sales (you've seen my zines) and advertising.

I know Advertising has become a dirty word in the world of the modern internet, but I think the way we do it is both tasteful and fully acceptable (or I wouldn't do it.)

We advertise local businesses, run by people I've actually met.

We run one ad per video that we run on our stream. We get paid for doing this.

Eventually, we'll get paid a large amount of money for doing this, but it's a small amount right now. That's okay.

We use the funding from merch, zines, and advertising to pay for production, distribution, and discoverability.

Our zines are full of information about our media. About half the ads we run on the platform are just for other programs, for our roku app, etc.

We're bootstrapping our audience through two key avenues.

The fediverse is the first one. You fine people have been incredibly supportive of our work (https://newellijay.tv and https://communitymedia.network and https://ellijaymakerspace.org and etc. etc. etc.) and have helped to fund it directly, have purchased merch, and have watched our shows.

The other avenue that we've used for bootstrapping is building relationships with local businesses. Lots of places in town have a TV in the corner running MSNBC or Fox News or whatever.

We offer then 3 months of free advertising to run our stream instead, and then we use our installations in those businesses to sell advertising to other places in town.

This mostly means things like waiting rooms, dining rooms, etc. The local mechanic, a coffee shop, a couple of restaurants, the visitor's center at the chamber of commerce.

Believe it or not, other businesses in town are *really* eager to reach the audience of people who are in physical proximity.

It's not perfect! I don't make enough money to fund a production schedule as big or as fast as I'd like.

I'd prefer to have five or six editors and a full time crew + 10-20 actors.

Instead I have three or four super part time actors, a part time crew of three, and two part time editors.

But our media production work is bootstrapped and self funding.

There are three parts to growing a network like this:

- Attracting new viewers
- Attracting new media producers
- Attracting more money

I am proposing a federated model, built on peertube and other open source technologies, that enables self organizing communities to share media internally and to pool resources.

I suggest that these networks leverage social media (the fediverse) and print media (zines) plus build relationships with local institutions and third spaces to advertise their programming and find one another.

Along the way, we build a hub and spoke distribution network of CC content, funneling people back to original creators.

I dunno if it'll work! I think it will though.

I think that a bunch of folks making zines about media, making t-shirts and zines to fund media, making media, and distributing one another's media has the potential to be actually little-r revolutionary and might eventually also facilitate some big-R Revolutionary stuff.

And with the writers strike now extending to an actors strike, the studios are definitely terrified, and there's never been a better time to DIY.

https://communitymedia.network
https://vod.newellijay.tv
https://newellijay.tv
etc. etc. etc.

@ajroach42 It's gonna be months before any of them budge, I have a friend in LA who told me how long these things can last, and this is a particularly prickly set of issues so this is absolutely a great time to strike when the iron is hot.

@Username_Here_ASAP I don't think any of us are in a position to say how long this is going to last, the last time a SAG strike happened was 50 years ago, IIRC.

I dunno when the last time both unions went on strike at the same time was.

It could go a long time, it could end tomorrow.

We're in uncharted waters.