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New creators are going to strike while the industry’s hot.
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65,000 Hollywood actors took up picket signs during the first week of the SAG-AFTRA strike. They joined thousands of Hollywood writers who first took up picket signs in May for the WGA strike. There are lotsa nuances, but both organizations are primarily negotiating for their members to 1) receive higher residual payments on streaming platforms, and 2) future protection from artificial intelligence making their likenesses and jobs obsolete (at least in the eyes of studio execs).
There’s a lot to unpack, but here are the three main takeaways:
1️⃣This thing is going to last way longer than you think.
A studio executive reportedly told Deadline, “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” Another exec said that tactic was “a cruel but necessary evil.”
Regardless of the negotiating tricks or egos at play, streaming services have created a glut of content over the past several years, much of which is good, and much of which you have not watched.
Head over to Metacritic and check out the best TV shows of 2023. (Rotten Tomatoes works, too, but you gotta go by month.) How many have you seen? How many have you heard of? Or check out the recent Emmy nominations. Ask yourself the same questions.
Several years of Wall Street screaming at SVOD platforms for growth at all costs spawned an unprecedented amount of content creation. You didn’t have time to watch it before with all the new stuff coming out. But now, those platforms are going to market to you their underwatched hits from the last few years and you’ll give them a chance because nothing new is on.
2️⃣Hollywood celebs enter the influencer marketing game.
To be clear, this won’t be the case for bona fide A-List celebrities (though if you are a bonafide A-List celebrity and you don’t want to act in non-struck indie films, you’ll have some more time on your hands to launch that alcohol/apparel/etc. brand). But actors who can’t launch a mobile phone company and/or are getting started and have a knack for social media will soon find an influx of inbound requests for partnerships with marketing reps eager to do some deals.
Also, expect upticks in Cameos and Twitch accounts and people asking Paul Scheer and T-Pain how this livestreaming thing works.
3️⃣Below the Line people are gonna get huge.
A lot of actors and writers are going to be not working. But so will thousands of craftspeople that work on television and movie productions from struck studios and production companies. Makeup artists, hairstylists, set designers, animators, architects, woodworkers, and more.
These individuals are specialized and incredibly talented–two things the algorithms of short-form video platforms @*#@ing love. If they can get some basic training in content creation, I expect we’ll be writing about a lot of them on Tubefilter six to nine months from now.
I get into deeper details on this with Lauren Schnipper on the latest episode of the Creator Upload podcast. You can check it out on Apple Podcasts or whenever you listen. You’re gonna dig it.
