You never know the accuracy of those figures. They count a video as viewed if it's clicked on, even if you click away after one second. Also some folks pay marketing companies to artificially inflate the number of hits.

That probably makes sense. The video in question was called something like Britney's Vagina, so it's either artificial hits, or that's the most popular term on Youtube right now. It could go either way, really.

Netflix will let you save Drive:season one. I added it to my queue just because. Perhaps my DVDs will ship from a parallel universe.

Roger A. Trevanti Explains The AMPTP's New Proposal.

This is pretty great.

But guess how much money studios made on the Internet last year? Zero dollars. Zero zero zero, zero zero zero, zero dollars. With a one and a two in front of those zeroes. [$120,000,000] See? Zero dollars. There's no money to give.

I wonder if the MSCL stream is testing the water for re-airing old stuff on tv if the strike goes on.

I was ranting at the world.

Here is my rant for today.

I finally found a pair of jeans in my closet that fit me and that I don't have to hike up every other second. I wore them when I went out to run errands.

Aaaaaand I ripped them.

Damn you, world! Damn you, traitorous jeans!

Laga - I did the same!

If there's no money to give, what's the harm of signing 2.5% of it away?

Polter-Cow

One of accounting tricks that the studios have used to minimize payment of royalties relies on the fact that studios are not just production houses, but part of much larger media empires. When we talk about FOX, for instance, the FOX production studio is considered a separate legal entity from the FOX network and the various FOX cable nets.

The example I remember was that on Murder, She Wrote, JMS was a writer and I think Universal was the production house. Universal was selling the episodes to Lifetime, another branch of the corporate empire. One day they realized they were charging themselves money to sell episodes in the larger corporate sense. So they sell themselves episodes for a dollar. Since payment to the creators is derived from sale price, then the creators get paid pennies for the rebroadcast of an episode, even if it is the first rebroadcast. I think NBC and Sci-Fi have the same corporate parents, so when NBC showed Battlestar Galactica eps a year or so back, the writers (along with everyone else who got a percentage) get maybe paid enough to buy a coffee.

This is perfectly legal under the previous contracts. The networks are technically separate companies and thus are not signatories, even though they are owned by the same people in the end. Everytime the contract has been up for renegiotation since the beginning of media consolidation, the AMPTP have refused to revisit the issue, saying sales to separate corporations, even if they share the same owners, are sales to other non-signatory corporations, so better learn to suck it up and move on.

I suspect its inclusion into the talks as an attempt to have something to bargain with, but I am no expert. That being said, I don't think this is something that will get much traction with the man on the street. The consolidation of production and networks works against the AMPTP here. Ask the man on the street if he thinks FOX Studios and the FOX network are separate companies with no relationship to each other, he will look at you as if you are crazy. Plus the fact that many networks require to have an equity position in the shows that they air only adds to linkages.

Thanks, CaBil. Just another way the writers (and everyone else) are getting screwed, I see.