6 ms·

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 h

• lacrimacida 3y ago
  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 a way they may determine our fate as well. Imagine one scenario where the strike flops, AI is implemented as replacement and all goes well. In this scenario we’re more or less going to follow the same. I let other scenarios play out however your imagination desires
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • darepublic 3y ago
    The non unionized would have no recourse regardless. Except going outside the current game
    • mschuster91 3y ago
      > The non unionized would have no recourse regardless. Depending on the power of the union in negotiations, others may benefit as well.
    • drewcoo 3y ago
      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.
      • batiudrami 3y ago
        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 whose skills don't easily transfer elsewhere.
        • throwaway14356 3y ago
          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
    • cudgy 3y ago
      Yes, they could grab the reins by making their own content without the studios and putting it on YouTube or some other multimedia platform, similar to substack.com
  • taeric 3y ago
    I'm trying to see how this put anything "in perspective." :( I could as easily say they are on strike because the economy is contracting, and they are the least shielded from the contraction. No need to add SV into the mix. Studios have always been on the lookout for ways to not pay them, such that the latest attempt being streaming seems a bit of a non story item. Again, consider if we had never moved to streaming and instead they were trying to get their payouts from the movies that are checked out from redbox. They would be seeing as much of a dropout in residuals as they are seeing, as the dip is in syndication residuals.
    • lacrimacida 3y ago
      Sorry, re-reading my comment I could see how my comment may sound offensive and if it does I appologize, that wasn’t the intention. And I do agree with your reasoning from your angle. But do consider other angles so we don’t disagree unnecessarily when we may in fact see the whole picture from different angles.
      • taeric 3y ago
        :) Same, I definitely do not intend my comment in a harsh way. And I do want to stress that I agree getting the writers and actors back at the table is worth doing. Same for all parties involved, all told.
    • lotsofpulp 3y ago
      > I could as easily say they are on strike because the economy is contracting, and they are the least shielded from the contraction. The writer’ and actors’ problem is not a contracting economy (if that is even true). Their biggest problem is people now have tons of cheap entertainment options other than movies/TV, such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and arguing on forums like Hacker News.
      • taeric 3y ago
        Ish? If this was true, then the studios would also be having a revenue problem.
  • fnord77 3y ago
    if they're being replaced, what good is a strike going to do?
    • godzillabrennus 3y ago
      Make the transition slower:
    • jrumbut 3y ago
      This is a fight over (among many other things) who realizes the benefits of AI/streaming. AI might mean that writers are freed from drudgery, their talents enhanced with powerful AI tools and now have a much more pleasant job that pays the same or perhaps more because they can produce more content or higher quality content. This is the Star Trek future. AI could also mean that professional writers are barely needed. AI does the work, studio owners reap the benefit, and writers work day jobs and fight over the occasional poorly paid editing gig. We as people will choose how AI changes the social contract. Anyone who relies on selling their labor to feed themselves and their families needs to be advocating for my first scenario, where productivity gains from AI are shared between workers, executives, and investors rather than monopolized by one or the other.
      • lotsofpulp 3y ago
        >Anyone who relies on selling their labor to feed themselves and their families needs to be advocating for my first scenario, where productivity gains from AI are shared between workers, executives, and investors rather than monopolized by one or the other. I feel like the only way to effectively do this is to advocate for higher marginal income/wealth taxes that redistribute those productivity gains. Trying to fight for it on a business to business basis is easily a losing battle. For example, one is going to wonder why they should pay more for groceries if technology can help them pay less.
    • Shawnj2 3y ago
      They’re not, they want legal protections to stop companies from replacing them For example paying someone for a day, scanning them, and using their image forever in AI content is both legal and allowed under SAG guidelines. Even if you think that what writers currently do can be done well by AI I’m pretty sure most reasonable people think that companies being able to do that is BS and you should get residuals or a really fat check if a company wants to pull that shit. It’s also about generally deteriorating conditions for actors and writers like shit pay and steaming companies not paying residuals. I actually think the AI part of the writers strike is mostly off the mark because ChatGPT is nowhere near good enough to replace a human writer and won’t be for years but general mistreatment of entertainment industry workers is totally a thing
  • nitwit005 3y ago
    They're also on strike over rather mundane things like residual payments, which have been very low for some streaming shows. The AI bit is just much more exciting to talk about, for everyone involved.
    • lacrimacida 3y ago
      It’s the icing on the cake and bluntly ready to extract all the remaining value from the trade. I would not downplay the emphasis AI in this scenario
  • tessierashpool 3y ago
    > Hollywood the actors and writers are on strike because Hollywood, the money making machinery decided to replace them with a product from SV. this is slightly incorrect. the WGA was talking about a strike, then the AMPTP made it clear that they wanted to reserve the right to replace people with AI, and that escalated things quite a lot. but a strike was already on the horizon before that happened. the analysis in the original LA Times article is all about streaming, and barely touches on "AI" (ML). this is correct, in my opinion, because the role of ML in this is kind of an attention-getting red herring. in fact the article's way better than I expected when I clicked the link. I basically endorse its reasoning top to bottom. a little context on that endorsement: I built a decent chunk of Hulu when it launched, and I've worked for an actor whose name you'd all recognize. I have a vaguely insider-ish perspective on this, and I would really urge you to consider the fact that Hollywood's extremely visible, but also quite opaque. this is the most important paragraph in the article: It’s been noted, and correctly so, that entertainment industry labor disputes often erupt when there’s a change in technology — from theaters screening projected films to the cathode ray tube of the home television, say, or the rise of YouTube and other online content in the 2000s — and that happens for a reason. Historically, executives and management use a disorienting new technology to try to justify lowering wages of their workers, and they have done so since the days of the Industrial Revolution. they definitely want to do that with AI, but they have been doing that here in reality with streaming.
• brucethemoose2 3y ago
  My vision of this future is drones dropping off DVDs or USB sticks for "on demand" watching. TBH, studios would probably have stopped DVD/Blu Ray releases if Netflix took this route.
• oldtownroad 3y ago
  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 indefinitely. Netflix are a studio, Netflix is responsible for many of their own show creators having zero royalties — look at the squid game financials! Netflix are not an innocent tech company doing the best for consumers in the face of big bad Hollywood. For all of Hollywood’s flaws, it was a simple business: make something, make money off it, repeat. Netflix brought the Silicon Valley funny money into the picture and threw everything out of whack.
  • dleslie 3y ago
    > 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 Then that's just the cost of acquiring content, not a total loss. I'm not comfortable labeling it a loss because it supports user retention _and_ acts as force to draw in other content providers.
  • justrealist 3y ago
    > Netflix churns out hundreds of thousands of hours of content each year at heavy, heavy losses Netflix is quite profitable, so this is clearly not true in any meaningful way.
    • mschuster91 3y ago
      A lot of their productions are very niche. I mean, Bojack Horseman... absolutely good show, beloved by its fans and more than worth a binge, but was it actually mainstream much outside of the Mental Health Twittersphere? The worst thing for Netflix is, for none of their original shows they managed to pull off "outside" draw: merchandise/swag outside of hoodies and coffee mugs, books, spin-offs and most importantly fan fiction.
      • 3y ago
• gochi 3y ago
  Ok, but Netflix has a seat at the AMPTP table. They are the Hollywood you're talking about now. If Netflix never got into production that would be a different story, but they did so here are the consequences of that.
• ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  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-universal-la-trees/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/19/business/sag-aftra-strike-uni...
• theptip 3y ago
  My impression was that Netflix came along with up-front pay packages because taking a residual-heavy deal was not attractive back when streaming was unknown. No mustache-twirling required, just a business model that made sense then and is no longer equitable. The other point is that extras are getting full-body 3D scanned for a day’s pay, licensed in perpetuity. That is an existential threat to the profession; no actor could ever become a high-paid superstar if a bunch of producers own the rights to their likeness from back before they were famous. That’s the Marvel movies, not Netflix. As you say, it seems Hollywood has a long storied history of abusing their labor pool at whatever opportunity they get. This is not something they learned from SV.
  • koolba 3y ago
    > The other point is that extras are getting full-body 3D scanned for a day’s pay, licensed in perpetuity. Wtf? Is this really a thing?
    • aintgonnatakeit 3y ago
      Yes https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/19/ai-actors-fear-sag-strike-hollywood/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/19/ai-acto... https://www.axios.com/2023/07/18/hollywood-strike-sag-aftra-wga https://www.axios.com/2023/07/18/hollywood-strike-sag-aftra-... https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/07/14/striking-actors-say-hollywood-studios-want-to-perpetually-use-ai-generated-replicas-of-actors-for-one-days-pay/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/07/14/strikin...
    • taeric 3y ago
      Extras have always gotten basically nothing, though? Quite often extras are "allowed to stand around" for filming of a scene that doesn't have a star in it for the chance of being on the big screen. Or is that no longer the case?
      • chris11 3y ago
        It's not just extras. Jet Li turned down The Matrix Reloaded because they were requiring that he also sell the rights to the martial arts moves used.
• foundart 3y ago
  Is Netflix a Silicon Valley company? I think so. The article claims the trend of going big on streaming started at Netflix and the more traditional players followed along. It seems a reasonable claim.
• lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > For fun, consider that if netflix had stuck to the DVD model, they could still be profitable. Netflix is earning multiple billions of dollars in profit per year already, far more than they used to with DVDs. Also, I expect most people to prefer digital only streaming to any device they have at any time over having to deal with physical disks and single locations.
  • taeric 3y ago
    Yeah, I shouldn't have said "still be profitable." For that, I meant they could be in a stronger position to ignore studios. And it is a bit mind boggling to think of 4.4 billion in profit. Wow. Still, my point mostly stands? If the studios decide not to let Netflix stream their movies, then they don't stream their movies. This was far more hollow of a threat in the early days of streaming, but nowadays it is very conceivable that they can leverage their back catalog for someone. Such that Netflix is quickly getting to where what got everyone to sign up is at major risk of going away. And this is far from hypothetical. It is mind boggling to me that Daredevil is no longer available on Netflix. Something they literally helped produce.
    • pests 3y ago
      > It is mind boggling to me that Daredevil is no longer available on Netflix. Something they literally helped produce. Except they didn't. Netflix was the broadcaster. Daredevil was produced by Marvel Television, ABC Studios, and Drew Goddard's production company. In fact, originally those shows did show a Netflix bumper at start but that has been replaced now with Disney+ as that's where it now streams.
      • taeric 3y ago
        Amusingly, I suspect this is me falling for the "engineer" trap. Producer is clearly a technical term in that field that all to many of us think means something more nebulous. Doesn't help with "executive producer" being a thing that I know a ton of folks mean "funded." So, whatever their technical role's name, my understanding is that they put up a lot of money for the shows to be made. And now can't show them. Is that not the case?
• LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  > That is all to say, no, SV is not the root of the problem here. In 2015, %80 of people watched network tv regularly and 50% had streaming accounts. That has flipped in the last 8 years. Total television revenue has declined 35% in that timeframe. What’s happening to television now is what happened to newspapers 10 years ago: low-cost distribution alternatives disrupted the major networks and created new business models to control distribution and make employees take the financial hit. The fact is that Netflix was first to adopt streaming and did so with vast venture capital backing. This analysis does a pretty good job of looking at the financials of television in the streaming era. 0: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PRk5_ohCB70&pp=ygUeU3RldmUgcmF0dG5lciBob2xseXdvb2Qgc3RyaWtl https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PRk5_ohCB70&pp=ygUeU3RldmUgcmF...
  • taeric 3y ago
    Right, the way that residuals played out for syndicated shows is ultimately a large part of the decline for the guild members. I am still a little curious on a few things in this. For one, I'm not clear on how long residuals can last in a sustainable way. Pretty much no matter how I try and simulate this payment model, it falls on needing more income from future participants. Not quite a ponzi scheme, as you are not asking future members to put money into the pot. You do need them to keep the machine running, though. Granted, in that framing, the studios are effectively private equity groups that have managed to skim off a ton of value from the creative works? (Saying this as someone that isn't too keen on what a lot of private equity has done.)
    • genmud 3y ago
      > I'm not clear on how long residuals can last in a sustainable way They were possible before, since there was much less content available at any given time. The media industry is in a bit of a death spiral it feels like, with a race to the bottom in many ways. When broadcast tv was a bigger thing, syndicated shows were licensed to stations, who typically sold ad slots, allowing them to pay the licensing fees. The problem is in many ways streaming platforms just really aren’t that cheap to run in the US when compared to old methods of distribution and the margin is almost entirely going to the platform, not the people making the content.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  If Netflix had stuck to that model they'd be dead.
  • taeric 3y ago
    Probably not. Redbox is doing fine, after all. Would they be the billion dollar company that they are? Also probably not.
• gumby 3y ago
  As you say the studios are good at killing the goose: tv, cable, VHS: each a huge money spinner and each caught tooth and nail by the studios. > You don't need a special license to buy a dvd and rent it out to anyone. Actually the studios strong-armed Netflix into not distributing new disks but maintain a “release window”. Redbox wouldn’t do this and anyway couldn’t get Netflix’s sweet deal, so ended up asking people to buy disks themselves and send them to Redbox. First sale doctrine makes this legal in the US (as you implied) and the studios could do nothing. Now Netflix and the studios are in a Mexican standoff and the studios make less.
  • taeric 3y ago
    Yeah, the nuances around movie rentals are absurd. Would love to see more of an exploration around that.
• soundsgoodtome 3y ago
  Why don’t we reduce this down a bit? Hollywood studios are businesses. Businesses exist to create value for owners. Hollywood talent is expensive. AI tends to be much less expensive. Hollywood studio execs believe they might be able to replace expensive talent with cheap AI, thus creating more value for owners. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
  • cudgy 3y ago
    How does destroying the industry you are in and making it easier for competitors to enter with crappy product create value for owners?
    • soundsgoodtome 3y ago
      Most of these people seem to think one to two quarters at a time, so anything longer than that doesn’t matter. Just my $0.02
• johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I didn't read the article that way. I think that SV is simply the current catalyst of tech being used to try and justify decreases in quality and/or number for labor. Hollywood seems to either be huffing the same AI fumes or at least want people to believe they have for this iteration. I guess we'll see how the dust settles
• DropInIn 3y ago
  > You don't need a special license to buy a dvd and rent it out to anyone. Just as you don't need a special license to loan or sell a dvd to a friend. You bought it and you can do that. Allow me to introduce you to British Columbia, Canada: "By law, any person or business that distributes or publicly exhibits motion pictures or Restricted or Adult DVDs (adult motion pictures or “adult videos”) in BC requires a licence. To “distribute” means to rent, lease, sell or supply (or to offer to provide any of these services)." https://www.consumerprotectionbc.ca/get-keep-licence/motion-pictures/ https://www.consumerprotectionbc.ca/get-keep-licence/motion-... There's also a whole industry for supplying dvd for rental purposes which charges serial multiples of the retail price per copy and you are legally required to purchase those version and are not permitted to rent out retail dvds. I learned this when I was going to try to have a used dvd club in a small town and fell afoul of these issues, as it was a for profit venture.