Where Have All The Viewers Gone?

May 13, 2008 - 14:05 PM PST

From my blog: still ACTING after all these years

The big sticking point in the now on-hold negotiations between SAG and AMPTP apparently centered around actor's compensation from DVD, Cable, Internet Original Programming, Video Streaming and other so called 'New Media' distribution channels.

Diane Holloway's column in today's Austin American Statesman touches on this issue, though she isn't discussing the negotiations or a possible actor's strike as such.

The writers' strike crippled the current season and contributed to a precipitous viewer plunge. According to trade publications, shows returning after the three-month absence lost as much as 30 percent of their pre-strike audience. And ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox this season expect to see a 17 percent decline of their combined audience.

This has been an ongoing trend for a while. Last year's dropoff, the networks explained, happened because Daylight Savings Time came earlier than usual. Nobody actually bought that. The strike will be blamed this year, perhaps more effectively.

It's still unclear exactly where network viewers have gone, but DVDs, recorded programs, cable and Internet viewing have contributed to that great sucking sound that once was network TV's dominance.

And to add a bit of evidence to just how dramatically (no pun intended) things are changing in television distribution, there is this:

"Friday Night Lights," whose death knell sounded for two seasons, got picked up for a third season in April, after NBC struck a deal with DirectTV to share production costs and give the Austin-based show an exclusive run on satellite first.

It's great news for Texas film production that FNL is still alive and will again shoot in Austin. The fact that the show is alive because DirectTV stepped in to share production costs and thus gets an exclusive first run on the show says something about how actors and their guilds have to look at the current and future distribution landscape.

The producers will probably look at the information above and say "we can't afford the current compensations structures..our network audience is smaller...we need to roll back actor's rates."

But overall, has the size of the audience for filmed, taped, or digitally captured entertainment diminished? Or has it actually increased with the population and just spread out beyond the confines of broadcast television?

Twenty years or so back when the producers and actors were negotiating a deal that included compensation to actors for cable usage, the producers loudly claimed that the industry couldn't possibly support the same scale of payments to actors that they were receiving on network tv.

'Don't kill this infant technology' was their battle cry. So, the actors relented and settled for deals on cable that, to this day, are insufficient. And now can anyone (leaving content aside) distinguish cable programming from network TV? Yet the compensation to actors, particularly the residual structure, is stuck in the 'don't kill the infant technology' days.

With this history in mind, and with the obvious shift away from income streams such as network TV rerun residuals to DVD distribution of TV product, SAG is in the position of once again accepting a bad deal for actors that will get worse over time, holding out for a better deal through negotiations, or possibly striking to get the producers to move off their current stance.

Over the next few days, it will become more apparent how the current negotiations with AFTRA will impact the current state of affairs. Per Daily Variety:

AFTRA and the majors have launched a second week of primetime negotiations for a deal that's expected to do little toward easing the town's strike fears -- since SAG still won't have a new feature-primetime contract once AFTRA makes its deal.

The Screen Actors Guild hasn't yet responded to an invitation from the majors to resume negotiations May 28. It also hasn't yet decided whether to ask its 120,000 members for a strike authorization, which requires 75% approval.

And with SAG's current deal expiring on June 30, the lingering uncertainty has put the brakes on any feature greenlights.

SAG's scheduled a town hall meeting to update members on the negotiations next Monday in Los Angeles.

Stay tuned. Read the entire Daily Variety article.