TELEVISION & RADIO - Could a strike be a ball for Web?
So, assume you may have heard about this writers strike thing.
Most of us might not notice much difference in prime time right away, but as of tonight, if the Writers Guild of America strike was called as planned, Leno and Stewart and Colbert, and perhaps Letterman and Kimmel too, are likely zapped till further notice (and it's five nights into November sweeps -- how great is that for local stations?). The supply of series such as "House" and "The Office" won't hold out forever, either.
So what happens, viewer-wise? Of course, no one knows. And years from now, no one may remember (fun experiment: Try asking your friends who are old enough to reconstruct their viewing habits during the last writers' strike, a five-month ordeal in 1988).
But it seems one of the biggest unknowns has to do with the vast quantities of entertainment that are now being generated for the Web -- and remember, the value of scripted material broadcast over the Internet and other non-TV media is one of the major issues that writers and producers have been squaring off over.
The Web, as a matter of fact, is the one obvious difference between now and '88. Faced with a long drought of fresh scripted material on network and cable TV, are we all going to end up junkies for the junk on YouTube? Hey, catch you later on MyDamnChannel.com! FunnyOrDie.com -- it's alive again!
Simply put, will the strike be a watershed moment for Web TV, the same way the 1988 strike was for cable? Maybe convergence -- how many laptops have you burned through since you last took that term seriously? -- will arrive at last, a meeting of the twain.
Well, maybe. Certainly that's the hope of the teeming legions of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are crossing their fingers for their own YouTube jackpot. But strike or no, there remain a lot of obstacles to mainstream acceptance of made-for-Internet entertainment.
Like, for instance, me.
Mind you, I've no objection to the concept of Web video, scripted or otherwise. My love for Will Ferrell in FunnyOrDie's "The Landlord" knows no bounds. But as someone who covers TV for a living, and watches a lot of it (and spends even more time online), I have a hard time believing that throngs of viewers are suddenly going to become Internet-video converts, at least as the Internet currently exists.
