This just in from the Writers Guild of America:
The good news: 99.2% of the voters said yes, so this now is an official, done deal.
Category: The TV Biz
More on the Changing Face of TV
Yesterday, TVWriter™ presented an article about the effect of cord cutting on standard TV distribution, and if you’re a cable or satellite exec you had to have been upset by what you read. Today, we’ve found another article, and while this one won’t exactly ease the pain of those favoring the status quo, it does give audiences and creators everywhere something to eagerly await.
(Another reason why the recent WGA-AMPTP negotiation was so important!)
Living in the Future – How Things are Going for TV
The paradigm, she is a’changin’:
by John Biggs
A report by MoffettNathanson found that the pay cable industry lost 762,000 subscribers in Q1 2017, the worst drop ever. To compare last year’s Q1 saw a mere 141,000 subscribers lost.
Analyst Craig Moffett said that the “Pay TV subscriber universe [shrank] at its worst ever annual rate of decline (-2.4%)” and there have been 6.5 million cord-cutter (and the new “cord-never” user who doesn’t install a Pay TV source at all) watchers since 2013.
Inside the WGA-AMPTP Negotiating Room
A succinct and, overall, quite fair report on the negotiation process in the 2017 WGA-AMPTP contract negotiations from one of H’wood’s favorite trade mags:
by Cynthia Littleton
The dam broke at about 10:30 p.m. on Monday night. With 90 minutes to go to the strike deadline, the WGA and major studios began to find their way to the compromises that had been elusive during the previous five days of contract negotiations.
What the Latest WGA-MPTP Agreement Means
by Gerry Conway
LB’s NOTE: TVWriter™ has been getting a lot of email asking us – mostly in a more subtle way – what the big deal is about the result of the latest negotiation with the AMPTP and why are we, the members of the WGA, so thrilled about the result.
Good questions, for sure. And my good buddy Gerry Conway has some good answers, right here, right now (and also on his blog, where this short but perceptive reaction originally appeared just a few days ago):
Just got an email from the WGA negotiating committee, and for the first time since I became a member in 1978, I believe the Guild has achieved the impossible– we pushed back against the studios’ greed and intransigence without having to destroy or damage careers and livelihoods in the process.