Word that the Writers’ Guild strike is nearing its conclusion has been floating around since last weekend, but last night on CNBC, forrmer Disney CEO Michael Eisner stated publicly that the two sides had reached a deal and it would go to the union membership for approval over the weekend. In this morning’s Hollywood Reporter, a story with a dateline of last night goes into much more detail about what has to happen for the strike to actually conclude, without going into any real detail about the deal itself. One of the remaining sticking points will be how well the deal compares to the agreement reached with the Director’s Guild of America a couple of weeks ago. According to this article, it’s unlikely that the writers would vote much before late Sunday, and then only if there are no hangups in drafting the final contract. Also hinging on this is whether or not the two actors’ unions, SAG and AFTRA, will negotiate a similar deal when their contract with AMPTP runs out in June, or if they might consider a strike of their own.
Every ancillary business related to film and television production has take an enormous hit from this three-month strike. People in the post-production field say that the damage to companies in that business may be long-term, if not completely irreparable. Earlier fears that the strike would cause "pilot season" to go un-developed now seem to be easing, but the producers could still lose money in the process. That also has ripples in the networks’ ability to sell time to advertisers, and from there the ability of media buying firms to meet their own revenue goals, and so on.
Viewers, in the meanwhile, have found that the best part about the strike has been that they can finally catch up on all those Netflix rentals, Xbox games, and YouTube videos they have been missing.
What with getting on board with the DVR revolution (not to mention cable) only about 6 months ago, I can’t find enough hours in the day to watch all the stuff I’ve recorded. My Netflix account has barely been touched in 3 months. If there had been new TV to watch in the past few months, I’d never leave the house.