And now a word from Hollywood...
In an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times, Damon Lindelof, the co-creator of "Lost," wrote that TV is dying.
Citing devices like TiVo, the proliferation of high speed internet and an increasingly fragmented audience, Lindelof concluded that the entertainment industry as he knows it won't last much longer.
But that's no surprise. For the past few years, the words "digital," "internet," "download" and "streaming" have been mainstays at the TV upfronts. While "Lost" racks in millions of viewers who tune in to watch, Lindelof points out the show also has legs across the vastness of the web.
"My show, 'Lost,' has been streamed hundreds of millions of times since it was made available on ABC's website," Lindelof wrote. "The downloads require the viewer to first watch an advertisement, from which the network obviously generates some income. The writers of the episodes get nothing. We're also a hit on iTunes (where shows are sold for $1.99 each). Again, we get nothing."
But how much income amounts to some income seems to be the sticking point. While major media companies like NBCU and News Corp. have teamed up to launch Hulu.com, the networks insist the internet is still largely experimental. (To dispute this point, many writers have strung together YouTube videos of media executives bragging about the fortunes being made online.)
This back-and-forth has been the cause for much of the strike's acrimony, but the debate also highlights a certain truth: TV's reach may be shrinking, but online video (though growing) hasn't exactly filled the void.
Daisy Whitney, a contributing writer for Television Week, says much of Hollywood is talking about the fact that the 1988 WGA strike heralded the rise of cable TV.
"The last strike was a kind of a perfect storm for cable," Whitney says. "There's certainly that same possibility for internet content because consumers are already getting comfortable with the idea of going online for video."
While Whitney doesn't see an end to high-quality shows like "Grey's Anatomy," she does think we are at the beginning of a new medium.
"There has been a lot of criticism that the internet hasn't had a breakout hit," Whitney says. "But I don't know if that's ever going to happen, and I don't know if it's necessary. The internet is all about niche content and a lot of diversity."
But the lack of a breakout hit hasn't stopped TV producing legends Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz from turning to MySpace for their next project. After bringing the world "My So-Called Life" and "Thirtysomething," the duo cut a deal with MySpace for a web series dubbed "Quarter Life."
Did they expect TV-sized numbers to greet the MySpace show? Probably not. But both Zwick and Herskovitz are betting that the creative control granted to them on the internet will help them develop a deep, highly loyal audience. And for MySpace, which will serve as a de facto network by selling ad space around the content, that's a bet that seems to make sense.
If Zwick and Herskovitz are right, there's a real disconnect going between TV and the web. Comparing the 1988 strike to today's dispute has its limitations. Cable offered a more robust distribution infrastructure and fewer content restrictions, but the end product was still TV. Overtime, cable channels like Showtime, HBO and CNN found their place in the TV landscape, meaning that the pie was simply cut into smaller and smaller pieces.
But when one thinks about the entertainment available on the web, it's hard to see a cable-style evolution when a more appropriate analysis might be a digital revolution. To be sure, the web vies with TV for the attention of consumers, but that doesn't mean one is capable of replacing the other.