Striking writers talk of launching web startups

Today in the LA Times, a piece by Joseph Menn on striking WGA members in Hollywood who hope to launch venture-backed online entertainment startups as a way to bypass conventional entertainment economics:

At least seven groups, composed of members of the striking Writers Guild of America, are planning to form Internet-based businesses that, if successful, could create an alternative economic model to the one at the heart of the walkout, now in its seventh week.
Three of the groups are working on ventures that would function much like United Artists, the production company created 80 years ago by Charlie Chaplin and other top stars who wanted to break free from the studios.
"It's in development and rapidly incubating," said Aaron Mendelsohn, a guild board member and co-creator of the "Air Bud" movies.

Link. Image: Aaron Mendelsohn (courtesy LA Times)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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noen

They ought to have done this as soon as they went on strike. A previous BB article talked about how the music industry is broken due to greed and stupidity. Can video be far behind?
Bionicrat2

Air Bud = Sign me up, pronto!
sonny p fontaine

Sumner Redstone starts his grave spin.
ianm

This is such an obvious outcome from the situation. It is also possibly the best media news in quite a while, nothing short of pulling the rug out of from under the despicable television industry in one fell swoop. Who would have thought bringing down Big TV would be this easy? Thank you pigheaded networks, we couldn’t have done it without you!
Pyros

What I don’t understand is why TV shows aren’t online avialable for everyone to watch for free. The advertising model could be far more successful than the current one. All shows could be distributed to people’s person websites. You would go to Hulu, (or whatever it’s called) or something like it, and you would pick your show. You would then be directed to some person’s local website which would have an advertising arrangement with the relevant parties (something like $2.00 per hour of viewed content, whatever. So Leave It TO Beaver loads on Jim Smith’s Plumbing Supply store in Sheboigan WI. He’s the advertiser instead of Dove soap. What does the network care who pays them as long as they get their dough? Two dollars per viewer is probably more than they currently get.

Anyway, that’s how I would try to do it if I were a muckety muck.
Noisecon

Wow, that mention of Air Bud at the end there pretty much drained all seriousness out of that report.

Hope it all works out for the writers.
Patrick McNamara

Podcasting has already developed to the stage where many podcasts could compete with radio (and sound almost indistinguishable). It won’t be long before vidcasts do the same. The real hangup with the video though is the money. It’s easy enough to do an audio podcast with just a cheap mic, but using just a webcam shows.

I think next year’s pilots could originate from web based productions; if not this year, then soon. The Internet is a good testing ground for artists and a place to develop ideas and skills.
Xeni Jardin

What seems silly to me is the notion that you have to go around kneeling and kissing VCs’ hands in order to start an internet business. These poor guys, it’s like all they learned about the internet they learned in 1999, before the drop. Hell, Boing Boing has never received a dime in VC funding. We didn’t start out as a business at all.
MoebiusTripp

Thank you Xeni, you are absolutely spot on. I wrote a proposal for a subscription model for Internet distribution of serial programming such as TV in 2003. The silence of it’s death was telling. If the writers and producers can overcome the calcified thinking of their industry, we on the Internet await their contribution unsullied by need to cater to advertisers or vulture capitalists.
Pyros

That’s what they need to do, and glad they’ve finally gotten the idea. Who wants to whore for big media anymore anyway? Boingboing is itself an example of this. BB is a great site but nothing that the average person with an IQ of 115 or so couldn’t acheive if they tried.