Roger’s $0.02 - Writer’s Strike

image from Fabebk

The continuing WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike has brought Hollywood’s production machine to a halt. Although there might be ongoing ancillary and post-production work, no new TV show episodes, movies, or commercials are being made. Currently, the strike is over a month old with some insiders predicting that it could last as long as three months. That’s three months of no new content. Most streaming platforms have a combination of a deep back catalog, a ready slate of already produced but unscreened content, and overseas operations that produce content. But that doesn’t automatically translate into viewers being interested in watching. I’m currently coasting on my Black Friday Disney+/Hulu subscription for $5 a month, but with rising fees other services I have subscribed to could easily see the axe. What’s even more interesting is that the sole beneficiary of the current content production pause on my video-watching habits has been YouTube and by association YouTubers.

Now YouTube has always been a clearing house of sorts for videos from all sources. Individual creators, hobbyists, online websites and blogs, magazines, NGOs, government entities, and of course large broadcasters trying to further monetize content on different platforms. Plus if you’re willing to pay or sit through ads you can find feature-length movies as well. In other words lots of different types of content that fill almost every available niche. And when your weekly watch hopper is empty I hit YouTube. A majority of the content is short and I can cover both general interest content like news and special interest categories like food history, military history, political and geopolitical analysis, tech reviews, and movie reviews. I know in my wife’s case her daily diet of evening talk show highlights has been replaced by YouTubers who produce hot takes on old pop culture properties, theme park travelogues, and true crime style mini-docs. Sure it's not the most riveting stuff but it certainly fills in as a satisfactory stand-in for the usual fare. I’m curious to see if any of the higher subscriber channels will see a small but noticeable in viewership as people seek “fresh” content.

Now the other beneficiary of the writer’s strike has been video gaming. The limited amount of time I spend watching TV amounts to maybe eight to nine hours a week. Now that I have very little to watch I split those hours to YouTube and a handful of games. I was playing Star Wars Jedi: Survivor until the game decided to crash and corrupt my save games in the process. 20 hours of gameplay are gone. A broken game imagine that. Read my previous column. Rather than restart from the beginning I’ve moved on to COD: Black Ops - Cold War. A curious mash-up of 80s Cold War era spy tropes and straight-up shooter mixed in with a dollop of anachronistic technology, historical events, and vernacular. This is of course a very long-winded way of saying the high-profile nature of the WGA strike I really haven’t noticed it. This in a way should worry Hollywood and its associated businesses on how much more competitive the entertainment space has become since the last big writer’s strike from 2007 to 2008.