As primetime continues its downward spiral, leaving us with the same old recycled (non)reality content and Stephen Colbert is reduced to lip-synching Prince songs for half his show, disgruntled writers are taking matters into their own hands.

Aaron Mendelsohn, whose breakout films were Air Bud and Air Bud: Golden Receiver (no comment, Disney I’m sure paid him fairly), and a group of TV and film A-listers are forming a new company called Virtual Artists.

They’re pegging Silicon Valley for funding to the tune of $30 million in startup capital, and insiders seem to think they can get that. Virtual Artists doesn’t plan to do high-budget films just yet, because of the risk, but will be focusing on low-budget content on a level of Napoleon Dynamite (level of cost, not necessarily quality).

And the good news for those aspiring, Mendelsohn says scripts from newcomers are welcome.

It’s good to see them having the gumption to compete head-to-head with the networks and studios that don’t seem to want to give them a fair cut. 
 

I especially enjoyed the detail Stephen Falk is providing:

Chet came by for a spell and joined us, and at one point we got in trouble with the cops for working the Walk button too hard, which is a pretty silly offense; no matter how much Michael Tabb wanted to go for the guy’s gun and tell him to get back in his car and drive away, Michael complied and laid off the button. (Hey, that last sentence fragment could have been a stage direction from an episode of Lost! They’re rubbing off on me.)

If this were fiction, you’d commend him for some excellent metaphors: "working the Walk button"; the apt use of "laid off."

Anyway, back to the topics in the lede, where I’m supposed to be (WARNING: The rest of this will be very stream-of-consciousness). It’s hard not to sympathize – I’m a writer myself, existing on a plane where the majority of writers exist, providing the content for a (hopefully fair) slice of the pie.

But the pie is converging to make a much bigger pie, and this band of writers is quite aware of that. Our own David Utter already pointed out Viacom’s hypocrisy, suing YouTube for an astronomical billion dollars while saying there’s no money to be made on the Internet. It’s either one or the other, right?

And it’s definitely the other. NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, they all know that, or they wouldn’t bother establishing presences on the Web. Hulu, anyone? It’s been coming for a while now, and Internet sales are becoming meaningful.

But soon (I don’t know, five or ten years down the line), TV and Internet will be one. AT&T’s U-Verse is the first step on the early road to this. Verizon’s fiber-to-the-premises connections is the next. Soon, just as everyone finishing complaining about how slow their DSL and FiOS are compared to the blistering speeds and available in Hong Kong and Japan and Norway, the floodgates will be opened up and no one will have to worry about bandwidth or the prioritization of data packets.

Those things will join the Model T, the Victrola, and the pliers we used to turn the dial on the TV. So don’t let the Verizons and the Comcasts of the world act like they’re in a real pickle when it comes to capacity.

Truth be told, those arguments are as BS as the arguments the networks are using to screw their writers out of fair compensation, because there is greed at the center of them.

And how does the homogenization of American culture fit in with this overarching chorus of greed? Easy, the telecommunications and cable industries want to do the same thing they’ve done with television and mobile phone service to the Internet. It’s all about standardization, predictability, and profitability.

How do you do that? Make it all the same. Make it scalable. Make it a commodity. Remember when there used to be something good on A&E and Bravo? Stuff you couldn’t find on other channels? Now what’s there? The same homogenized crap the other channels are selling, with a side of dumbing-down for everybody.

So where we are with the Internet right now is exactly chaotic enough that the big players want to settle it down to its most predictable and profitable. Right now there are millions of voices in all different forms of media, reachable by search engine.

That’s because we have a neutral network, where everybody is treated the same. Internet service providers are aware there’s less profitability in chaos. Take all that content, squeeze into nice digestible chunks via channels or portals, and charge for every step along the way.

Charge to connect. Charge to visit. Charge to deliver content. Charge for premium packages on both sides of the pipe. Charge, charge, charge, charge, charge. And then redirect so that everybody’s less fragmented, until everybody’s watching the same thing again, just like the good old days.

Fewer writers to pay, and many, many more ways to get people to pay you.

Net Neutrality, therefore, becomes more than a complex concept only understood and desired by a few geeks that know what’s going on. It affects everybody, especially everybody that’s quite tired of 300 channels of the same crap. 

Pogue’s opinion of, as he calls it, the big six conglomerates is very obvious, he sides with his fellow WGA members. 

The writer’s strike, no not the one back in 1988 but the one that started on November 5^th, 2007 continues to draw national attention.  Even big name actors joined in this week to bring more attention to the strike.

So if you’ve happened to be stuck in a hole for the past two weeks, here is what’s going on in California and New York. The Writers Guild of America decided to strike against the production companies and studios until negotiations are made between them.

What negotiations? The writers want a percentage of the profits made from the Internet, as well as a higher residual percentage of DVD’s sold.  They now receive .04% and are asking for .08%.  Yet that’s not all the writers’ want. They are asking to receive some kind of compensation from Internet sales and downloads.

“Our side is right. People are really invested in television, despite declining ratings, and they are pissed off.  They’re f***in pissed off and I think they should be,” said writer and blogger of plaintivewail.com, Stephen Falk.

When I interviewed Falk, he was actually walking the picketing lines. I had a hard time hearing him, but I could definitely hear all of the cars honking in the background in support of the WGA.

Besides his obvious anger towards the “big six,” Falk and Pogue urged television watchers to stop doing just that. They asked for the viewers to stop viewing and downloading shows on the Internet. 

We also talked with the press representative for the WGA East, Sherry Goldman of the Goldman Communications Group in New York City.  She told us basically what every other writer is saying.  She wasn’t sure when the strike would end, but hoped that the major companies would see the wrong in their doing and agree to meet again for negotiations.

So when will the two sides meet to talk things over? That is left up to the heads of both sides, and according to the majority of people we talked with; it could be quite awhile before that happens. 

Until the WGA and the “Big 6” meet again, you can say goodbye to new episodes of your favorite shows, including 24, and the shows related to current events like “The Late Show with David Letterman” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

So until reality shows start bombing and there is a huge outcry to get “Grey’s Anatomy” back, you can kiss your shows goodbye for now.

For more details of the strike and for the exclusive interview with Charles Pogue, Sherry Goldman, and Stephen Falk, you can watch the video right here on WebProNews.

Although Microsoft claims it “values your privacy, and we do not collect any information, such as your name or email address, that can be used to identify you or contact you,” the WGA makes daily contact with the company, for which the program has been compared to spyware. Each check-in transmits a timestamp and the user’s IP address.

Also of concern is the Redmond-based company’s increasing emphasis on the software. Ed Bott spoke with a Microsoft employee who said that “in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if it’s not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn’t installed, Windows will stop working . . .”

A Microsoft spokesperson (sort of) substantiated that comment, writing to Bott that “as the WGA Notifications program expands in the future, customers may be required to participate.” The readers’ responses to Bott’s article (and others on the subject) show a distinct lack of support for “mandatory participation.” For that matter, most of them are not at all fond of the WGA in its current form.

Microsoft might want to rethink its plans for Windows Genuine Advantage, assuming the employee’s and spokesperson’s statements were correct. A number of Windows users (including many with legitimate copies) are already using shady “workarounds” rather than deal with the WGA. From all indications, that group will only grow, even as Microsoft’s reputation diminishes, if the WGA tries to strengthen its influence.

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.