I can't find a link to an online report yet but at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, our friends at TiVo have announced the next new feature that will be implemented on their boxes, perhaps as soon as March. It will be the ability to download a video podcast or other streaming video from the Internet on your computer and then transfer it almost effortlessly to your TiVo, thereby enabling you to watch the show on your TV.
This is where the technology is heading for everyone and it goes to the core of the current labor unrest in Hollywood. If NBC rebroadcasts an old episode of The Office (to pick one show at random) on their old-fashioned teevee network, they have to pay the director, writer(s) and actor(s) some nice residual payments directly and there are also residual payments to various unions that go into those unions' health and/or pension plans. These amounts are not crippling. NBC will still make an awful lot of money with that Office rerun.
But they don't even want to pay that share if they can get away with it. They'll be able to collect even more money (they think) by making that episode available for Internet download, either for a fee or for a free, advertising-supported viewing. You can download it that way and watch it on the same TV…and they're hoping to establish from the get-go that residuals in that situation will be either non-existent or, if they have to share, mere token payments to a few guilds.
This strike is about a lot of things but mainly it's about that.