Legacy Media

What’s fascinating about the writer’s strike is that the prevailing view is that it will take a long time — too far in the future to think about — before the Internet has a big impact on TV and film production and distribution. You see this kind of thing quite a bit:

“Still, the question remains for the writers: will the piece of future digital revenues they captured be worth the grief endured these past few months? It won’t be in the near future. Advertisers are so much less valuable on the Web, and the real money remains in so-called legacy media.

“The negotiating committee for the writers is proud that they were able to establish a percentage payment on the distributor’s gross, but that win will be largely symbolic unless there is a fundamental change in the economics of digital distribution.” Link.

But media executives, and even the writers themselves, are going to be surprised at how quickly the change comes. All the things that don’t work about network TV and do work about Web video are going to whip up a cyclone of change in both the economics of digital production and distribution.

Advertisers will follow, tentatively at first and then all at once.

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