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Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

latimes.com

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Re: Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

#51

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

taeric wrote: post #5

I support the strikes and hope it comes to a good conclusion; but this feels a touch forced, honestly. I get that it is in vogue to blame silicon valley, but hollywood has a littered history of killing their goose, as it were. For fun, consider that if netflix had stuck to the DVD model, they could still be profitable. You don't need a special license to buy a dvd and rent it out to anyone. Just as you don't need a s…

Not sure who "Hollywood" is in your statement, but "Hollywood" is mostly the studio scumbags who are trying to make actors and writers obsolete; so yes they're trying to harness Silicon Valley technology to do it... but it's still asshole CEOs across the board.

What few articles point out is that these companies have been riding the gravy train for years on the backs of writers and actors, whose union agreed to an absurd and abusive contract LAST time. That's when the same C-suite trash finagled them out of their royalties by whining that streaming was "new media," when everyone the least bit savvy knew that it was NOT "new media" but in fact the new NORMAL.

So now we have people who don't even get benefits, and scrape by on multiple jobs, finally demanding fair pay a decade later... and the studio/network trash are trying to render them homeless. If you think these guys aren't assholes to the core, look at this: Universal Studios vandalized taxpayer-owned trees to DENY PICKETERS SHADE: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/19/business/sag-aftra-strike-uni...

Re: Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

#52

Post by woobar »

DriverDaily wrote: post #34
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The studios burned through lots of money for the streaming boom, and the investors want returns from their burned money right about now. At the other end, streaming services are stuffed with content. I have no proof, but I suspect viewers will learn than the back catalog is pretty good.

They’re stuffed with content, but much of the content is of poor quality. The good stuff everyone has seen, and you can attract new viewers with a new show that is good.

They have 30-40 years worth of content. I agree, majority is bad. But there is still plenty of stuff to watch. Plus, rewatching some old great show often is more rewarding than consuming all this new drek.

Re: Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

#53

Post by rtpg »

majormajor wrote: post #22

The interplay between SV in the form of Netflix and Hollywood in the last 15 years of streaming wars is interesting but the author loses the plot a bit in trying to connect to Uber, WeWork, etc. By the time those companies were making waves the Hollywood trends were already in motion. Netflix made waves for sure with original content, but if you look at in another light, it was just an extension of what HBO and other…

> at the same time the contracts weren't particularly well thought out

I think they were plenty thought out: Netflix set more or less fixed residuals, which is quite different from “more popularity = more money” for other distribution models.

People were mostly fine with it because most shows were not super popular. But if everything is on it suddenly there is no “high end”. And streamers pulling shows means your “low end” revenue disappears. No mountain to cover valleys, and valleys are getting deeper.

Re: Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

#54

Post by throwaway14356 »

batiudrami wrote: post #42
drewcoo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. The pending UPS strike is about improving the wages and benefits for non-union labor. Which in turn benefits the union labor because otherwise they're at risk of being replaced with cheap scabs someday.

In Australia collective bargaining workplaces unions negotiate the pay structure and benefits for all workers, members or not. This leads to some arguments that non union members benefit from the unions without paying the fees, and indeed, in my mostly white-collar government workplace only about 10% of workers are union members. Unions mostly exist for unskilled workers (the most replacable) or specialised workers w…

In the Netherlands employers pay part of the union contribution and members get some money from the union during the strike. Plenty of people are still not members

Re: Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

#55

Post by TechBro8615 »

oldtownroad wrote: post #24
taeric wrote: post #5

I support the strikes and hope it comes to a good conclusion; but this feels a touch forced, honestly. I get that it is in vogue to blame silicon valley, but hollywood has a littered history of killing their goose, as it were. For fun, consider that if netflix had stuck to the DVD model, they could still be profitable. You don't need a special license to buy a dvd and rent it out to anyone. Just as you don't need a s…

Netflix used their magical tech money to compete with studios in a wildly unprofitable way. Netflix churns out hundreds of thousands of hours of content each year at heavy, heavy losses, because they can afford to burn money to force the studios to the table. If we imagine a world in which streaming platforms were only ever licensees and not producers, it’s easy to imagine the status quo could have continued indefini…

It sounds like Netflix discovered a superior business model to the film studios and outcompeted them with a vertically integrated product that started from distribution and then moved to production, while the legacy studios did the inverse.

Re: Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

#57

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

jondwillis wrote: post #41

> We’ve heard a lot about the ways that studios want to reserve the right to use AI — to create endlessly usable digital replicas of actors, to generate scripts that writers will be paid lower rates to fix up. Does anyone know of ongoing attempts to achieve these kinds of products now ? Seems like vaporware right now

"Seems like vaporware right now"

That's the kind of thinking that these unions fell for LAST time, when they agreed to contracts that treated streaming as some kind of "new, unproven" media... which it obviously wasn't even then.

So the studios have been screwing these people for years, and now they're whining that they're being asked to pay up from here on out. This is like the banks bitching that Obama put a stop to a bunch of their shit after they screwed us for decades. And we're going to hear all that and more if Congress finally acts to rein in another scumbag industry: airlines.

Re: Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

#58

Post by CameronNemo »

jondwillis wrote: post #41

> We’ve heard a lot about the ways that studios want to reserve the right to use AI — to create endlessly usable digital replicas of actors, to generate scripts that writers will be paid lower rates to fix up. Does anyone know of ongoing attempts to achieve these kinds of products now ? Seems like vaporware right now

The product could exist in the future, and the studios could give themselves permission to use their library to train AI models in the contracts. Even if they don't do it this year or the next, actors want assurances that their facial structure won't be ripped off.

Separately, writers don't want to read the trash that contemporary LLMs spew, and readers/listeners/watchers don't want it either, even if a human edited it.

Re: Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

#60

Post by fnord77 »

lacrimacida wrote: post #14
taeric wrote: post #5

I support the strikes and hope it comes to a good conclusion; but this feels a touch forced, honestly. I get that it is in vogue to blame silicon valley, but hollywood has a littered history of killing their goose, as it were. For fun, consider that if netflix had stuck to the DVD model, they could still be profitable. You don't need a special license to buy a dvd and rent it out to anyone. Just as you don't need a s…

Let me put it in perspective for you: Hollywood the actors and writers are on strike because Hollywood, the money making machinery decided to replace them with a product from SV. I don’t care for Hollywood and indeed it has gotten quite garbage anyway but I do support the actors and writers striking because they can. For the rest of us it remains to be seen how we’re going to handle it or whether we boil slowly.. In…

if they're being replaced, what good is a strike going to do?
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