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The Hollywood writers’ strike is over — and they won big
(www.vox.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Those are some great accomplishments!
Are there any points on which they had to concede or compromise?
From the wording it sounds like they only got foreign residuals on streaming, not US. Given that one of the biggest points of the strike was that writers weren’t getting payed residuals for streaming (which is increasingly the main market) it does seems like a fairly big concession.
Admittedly the biggest issue was that streaming services are shockingly opaque about viewership numbers. There doesn’t really seem to be an industry standard for what counts as a “view”. Does someone scrolling past a video and it auto playing 2 seconds count as a view, does someone watching 90% through than going to the next episode count as a view?
To agree to paying residuals on shows would require admitting to what people are actually watching on their services. They really seem to not want to do that. Probably because most of what they’re hyping up or promoting is failing in real terms and they want to keep massaging the numbers.
So the compromise is they’ll do it for exports but not domestic. Maybe because they can waffle on the reasons for failure in the foreign markets but it is harder to do that domestically.
They are getting residuals from the US, but the problem now is defining "subscriber".
The residuals come if "20% of the subscriber base watches something within the first three months of its release".
As the article I linked gets into, this is more complicated because certain streamers not only keep their subscriber base private (which they can still do, but they'll have to give writers info, probably under NDA), but several also offer their streaming services as bundles with unrelated things (Prime Video with regular Prime subscription, Apple TV+ with Apple One, etc.).
So someone could be "subscribed" to Amazon Prime Video, but because it's bundled in with the normal "online shopping" Amazon Prime, they have inflated numbers of Prime Video subscribers because not everyone with Prime cares about the streaming part of it all.
Figuring that shit out is going to be the main issue with regard to streamers.
Thank you for the thorough explanation. The whole residuals issue sounds very complicated, and it's probably on purpose if it's up to the streaming services to manage this themselves.
I'm sure the companies didn't give them as much money as they originally asked for. Unions usually expect to concede partially on those numbers and start at a higher negotiation number.