The WGA Strike Isn’t Pushing Viewers Online

Allan Leinwand, a VC/Writer on GigaOm, asks if the Writer’s Strike is the inflection point at which viewers jettison TV and move to watching video online.

On a personal note, the writer’s strike is keeping us from moving forward with a potential deal with ABC, so it’s hard to support a strike when I am not a member of the guild and seem to be losing a big opportunity. However, I hope the result of the strike — the eventual deal — is worth it for my own writing/show-running future.

But I digress. My response to the blog post: Writers’ Strike: An Inflection Point for Online Video?

As a few people have mentioned above, the WGA Writer’s Strike is probably not the inflection point you’re looking for. While more and more people are looking for video content on the web, they are not devouring large clips. In fact, the average viewing length for online videos is still around three minutes, which is a long way away from a full hour (or, 42 minutes for Tivo viewers) of commitment for one show.

Sure, more people watched Will Ferrel’s “The Landlord” this past year than watched any one show on TV (over 40 million), but none of his follow-ups got anywhere near that audience (or buzz).

The “inflection point” you’re looking for, unfortunately for creators like me, is all about technology adoption. There will not be a significant changeover to “web-delivered” video until two things happen:

1) Computer Hard Drives become the primary storage location for personal video collections. In 1998/99, college students started ripping their CDs into MP3s and sharing them via Napster, and pretty soon after that, everyone else did the same. The same thing won’t happen with video until a) average, consumer hard drives get big enough to store ALL their DVDs, and b) there exists some standard for ensuring quality in digital files.

2) Just like music needed the iPod, so too does Web-deliverd video need a device to bring the “TV-like experience” to your TV. No one wants the computer experience on your TV; Microsoft’s WebTV failed years ago. I’m not sure why AppleTV (or the like) hasn’t taken off yet, but maybe it’s just too early to tell.

In any case, the writer’s strike is doing one thing. It’s driving creators to the Web. The growth in online content quality has been amazing during the past few months, and you’re starting to see more and more celebs on the web… that’s only upping everyone’s game.

So, we’re still stuck dealing with budgets in the hundreds of thousands, and profits in the tens of thousands. However, someone will discover the perfect combination of delivery, quality, and interaction, and they’ll hit the jackpot… albeit probably in 2009 or 2010. Now, everyone repeat after me, “Please be me. Please be me. Please be me.”

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