I’ve been following the developments in the labor negotiations between the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and the two main actors’ unions (SAG and AFTRA) for a couple of months now, and what began as quiet negotiation has turned into a very public squabble. Not between AMPTP and the unions, but between SAG and AFTRA and the various factions within. You have probably read or heard mainstream media stories now that big name actors are publicly involved. The media are playing up the George Clooney vs. Tom Hanks confrontation big time.

If you’ve been reading my posts, you know that AFTRA accepted what is generally considered to be a weak offering from AMPTP. The battle in these negotiations is over payments for re-use of material in digital deliverables, the same issue that the Writers’ Guild went to strike over during the winter. It’s felt that the deal AFTRA accepted is not as good as the deal the WGA got, but because AFTRA is a smaller subset of performers they just didn’t have the clout to push for a similar deal. AFTRA’s acceptance gave AMPTP a lot more leverage in negotiating with SAG, which actually walked away from negotiations a couple of months ago. So now the fight is whether or not to take the same deal as AFTRA or hold out for more and make the threat of an actor’s strike even more likely. Hollywood veteran Mark Evanier offers his assessment on the recent developments.

Meanwhile, having won their battle, the Writers’ Guild has moved on to new battles. Last week, Advertising Age reported that the WGA had petitioned the FCC to begin formal inquiries into the practice of in-show product placements on television. (It happens in film, too, but the FCC doesn’t have regulatory oversight there) Now the FCC officially announces that it will do just that, launching a formal Notice of Inquiry and Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOTE: link goes to a PDF). A similar effort was made last year, but the FCC abruptly dropped the proceedings.

The complaints come in two forms: first, media reform watchdog groups are opposed to the practice in its entirety. It’s one thing when brand-name products are used as props or background items on a set in the name of verisimilitude, and another when the action of a scene or even the entire production features specific products as part of the dramatic continuity. Some groups want the practice abolished, and others would settle for some sort of “sponsored by” notification in the credits of the show to acknowledge the presence of the advertisement. Second, the WGA and other industry groups aren’t bothered by product placements at all, they just want their cut of the action. Because product placements aren’t formally part of the production deal between a television network and a producer, writers and actors and so on don’t see any of the money the producer gets. Forcing the producers and networks to fess up to product placement would give the WGA et. al. something esle to bargain for with AMPTP down the road.

The music industry (which, let’s face it, is really the same thing as the movie industry and the television industry, since all media in the U.S. is controlled by five corporations) continues to die its slow, painful, desperate death. Last week the RIAA lost an argument they made in one of their ongoing cases against file sharing; they claimed that merely having files on your computer that were visible to other people constituted the same thing as actively uploading files for sharing. It puts them at a distinct disadvantage at prosecuting any more cases. Meanwhile, it looks like sme musical artists are beginning to see that there is life without the traditional record companies. According to this Ars Technica story from a couple of weeks ago, a clearinghouse label called “Merlin” that was formed by a handful of independent artists now licenses music for 12,000 artists, making it the fifth largest record label. Major artists as well as up-and-coming acts are offered, and Merlin may go after the thousands of artists who promote their own music on MySpace, giving them a chance at much wider promotions and sales.

The Associated Press has decided that they’re going to charge bloggers who quote more than five words in a row from an AP story, with a minimum charge of $12.50 for a 5-to-12-word quote. Be sure to read Cory Doctorow’s little screed in that BoingBoing link, because he nails it cold.

Meanwhile, in it’s announcement, the AP said it was meeting with some group called the “Media Bloggers Association”, but, as Teresa Nielsen-Hayden discovered, there is no such organization. There’s just some pathetic right-wing blogturd named Robert Cox who passes himself off as a “representative” of bloggers and has put up a site called “Media Bloggers Association” to justify his lame hornblowing. She dissects his shtick pretty thoroughly, so I hope the brain surgeons at the AP have a chance to read about who they’re dealing with before they think they’re going to start collecting any money from anyone.

Why is it that “old media” people have been so utterly unable to understand the mechanics of the “new media”? Thing like this, or the New York Times’ ill-advised “Times Select” paywall, do nothing but shriek out loud the complete cluelessness of the people who run these businesses. Even the television people are finally beginning to not fuck up every single thing they try, but the “dead tree” folks seem to think its still 1919 and William Randolph Hearst runs the world.

The May ratings sweeps are over, and the undisputed loser is NBC. NBC could only manage one series in the Top 25 for the entire season: one of the many and varied versions of “Law And Order” came in at #16. That puts NBC in fourth place behind FOX, although they were still ahead of CW.

NBC now has all its chips on doing well with the coverage of the Beijing Olympics, which will last for almost the entire month of August, but it’s unclear what they really might expect to gain as a long-term advantage. NBC is only bringing out four new series in the fall, so it’s not like there’s all that much to promote. Moreover, when they broadcast the Winter Olympics from Torino, Italy in 2006, the games were squashed in the ratings by programs like American Idol and Dancing With The Stars. Granted, they won’t have that kind of competition in August, but there’s a concern that viewer interest in the Olympics has dwindled, and there are many who have strong negative feelings about the games taking place in China.

Over at TVNewser there’s a post about open speculation that corporate parent GE might be willing to sell off NBC-Universal and that a potential buyer might be TimeWarner. TimeWarner is in the process of spinning off their cable division, but media industry analysts see a merger as a way to provide TimeWarner with a broadcast television presence…as well as a way to consolidate CNN and CNBC to compete against FOX News and Fox Financial News.

DSL Reports broke the story earlier this week that Comcast is planning on testing using bandwidth caps and overage fees to try to rein in what they feel is a problem with P2P downloaders. The cap that they are apparently considering is 250GB/month, with a $1.50/GB fee for every gig over the limit. Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider offers a very good explanation that puts a 250GB limit into perspective:

In practical terms, 250 gigabytes is:

- A LOT of Web usage. Your typical daily Web/email/IM usage is probably somewhere between 10-50 megabytes — maybe 100-200 if you’re watching some low-quality YouTube, or 300-500 if you’re watching a few hours of Hulu every day. So normal Web users won’t have any problems. (1000 megabytes = roughly 1 gigabyte.)

- A LOT of World of Warcraft. Downloading game patches uses a bunch of bandwidth once in a while, but normal game play tops out around 30-60 kilobytes/second, or maybe a 100-200 megabytes an hour run rate, according to one blog. Another user says normal usage is closer to 1-5 megabytes per hour. Continue to play until your eyes bleed.

- 2500-4000 MP3 albums, or 50,000 3-minute songs. Depending on quality/length, an MP3 album is somewhere between 60 and 100 megabytes. Amazon says its 3-minute MP3s are about 5 megabytes. There are only 43,200 minutes in a 30-day month, or enough time to listen to 14,400 3-minute songs. So you’ll be ok.

- 170-250 iTunes movie downloads. Digital movies in standard-def run between 1 and 1.5 gigabytes. “No Country For Old Men” is about 1.3 gigs, friend-o.

- 50-60 HD movie downloads. These run closer to 4-5 gigabytes each. So theoretically, this could be a problem, one day, for people who download more than 2 movies a day. Do you know any of those folks?

So: If you download one HD movie a week, six standard-def movies a week, 5 albums a week, play a ton of WoW, and surf a lot of YouTube and Hulu, you’ll still struggle to use 100 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. We think you’ll also struggle to listen to all that music and watch all those movies. Also, you should get out more. It’s nice outside! Go for a walk.

In other words, 250GB/month is A LOT for your average user, and still pretty generous for all but the most hardcore downloader. Ars Technica suggests that Comcast is trying to get the FCC off its back about a variety of complaints by offering a much more transparent way of determining “bandwidth hogs”, since there have been many customer complaints about being abruptly shut off by Comcast without prior warning or disclosure of how much is “too much”.

Meanwhile, today at DSL Reports, “Karl”, the writer who broke the story on Tuesday, has a lengthy list of criticisms and concerns about the implications of this plan, including the eventual moving to billing customers for their Internet usage on a “per-byte” basis.