Week of February 18, 2008

New Media: Just Like Old Media, Only Smaller

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

It's been a bad millennium to be in the media business. According to an Ad Age survey, media employment is at a 15 year low, while advertising and marketing positions are increasing. The losses in media are felt most keenly at newspapers, with one in four newspaper jobs eliminated since its peak employment in 1990. And newspapers account for 50% of all job losses in the media since 2000!

Zeroing in on 2007, in addition to newspapers, ad agencies, PR, radio and television all lost jobs last year. The only media sectors to go up last year were online media and (surprisingly) newspapers. Still, even these sectors are down from where they were before the tech bubble burst in 2000/2001.

Green Light For Blu-Ray

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The Hi Definition video war is all but over. Blu-Ray has emerged as the champion over HD DVD in a battle reminiscent of the VHS vs. Betamax war 25 years ago. Toshiba, a prime backer of the HD DVD technology has announced that is reviewing its strategy for the video format, with an announcement expected soon that it will discontinue production of the HD DDVD units.

The battle was won, in effect, in January when Warner Brothers announced that they would offer movies only in the Blu-ray format, effectively tipping the scales to that format. The final nails in the coffin came last week with Wa-Mart announcing the would only sell movies in the Blu-ray format, as well as Netflix' decision only to rent Blu-ray disks.

And the winner is...

Monday, February 18, 2008

The highly public dispute between the Hollywood Screen Writer's Guild and the TV and movie producers is over. Now everyone wants to know the answer to two questions: 1) When is my favorite TV show coming back? And 2) Who won? Answers to the first question are slowly trickling in from the production companies on a show-by-show basis. The answer to the second question is harder to determine, but it seems that it is probably the producers, for now.

The most publicized area of dispute was over royalties and residuals for programming streamed over the Internet, especially ad-supported TV offerings. The deal is complex, but this portion of it stipulates that writers get 2% of the revenues, but the revenue is fixed at $40,000 per (one hour) episode for the purposes of this deal, regardless of what the actual revenue is.

No one really knows how much money can be made from repurposing content for online distribution, but this deal is a start for the process of determining ho9w to share those revenues. While the writers may not have gained a lot this time, it opens the doors to really look a the books the next time their contract comes up for negotiation.