About that Hollywood Strike

A very simple explanation for plummeting wages

Everyone, it seems, is on strike in Hollywood. The Directors’ Guild of America (“DGA”) had threaten a work stoppage, but averted a strike when they signed a new deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (“AMPTP”) on Friday, June 23rd.

The Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (“SAG-AFTRA”), however have voted to strike. There are two dynamics at work here, one a very basic economic dispute over writer compensation, and another which is much more transformative - how artificial intelligence can be used by AMPTP to digitally create new actor performances.

In thinking about the economic dispute over writer compensation, consider:

The number of streaming channels has absolutely exploded. Go to your tv and scroll through all the channels. When there were three or four broadcast television networks, that aired programming less than 18 hours per day, let us call that X amount of programming. When cable television launched in the 1980s, perhaps we went from X to 4X or 5X programming. Many cable channels were not broadcasting on a 24/7 basis either.