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Studios and producers are scrambling to recruit creators to help fill a content void, stoking tensions over scab work and changing styles of storytelling. But striking actors and writers are increasingly less reliant on Hollywood, too, experimenting with new ideas on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Twitch in ways that could net them lasting followings — if not steady paychecks — that go beyond traditional industry success.

Source: The creator economy was already exploding. Then Hollywood went on strike.

Source: Google, Meta fight with Canada over law forcing them to pay for news

Netflix is often mentioned as an M&A player when a studio or media group is up for sale, but don’t expect the streamer to buy a major Hollywood business any time soon. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos, speaking on the company’s second quarter earnings call, said that he’s more interested in buying IP. “We’ve always looked at these things in terms of the opportunity of IP, versus those assets, some of those assets are stressed for a reason,” he said.

Source: Netflix Eyes IP Deals Rather Than “Stressed” M&A Assets, Plays Down Plans To Syndicate Originals

Though they hope for a quick resolution, entertainment executives say they are contemplating the prospect that the joint strike by actors and writers could drag on for months—even through the end of the year. Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global and Walt Disney are among the traditional companies whose broadcast-TV and movie businesses could be massively disrupted within months. Netflix and Amazon.com might not feel the pinch until 2025 or beyond, entertainment executives and analysts said.

Source: Streaming Brought Hollywood to a Standstill. Now Comes the Pain.

Rather than viewing the directors’ contract as a blueprint, the actors’ union deemed it insufficient.  While the directors accrued significant increases in the residuals they would receive, primarily via a formula that accounts for international streaming subscribers, there was little progress in getting recalcitrant tech companies to share more data about how well films and television shows performed on their services.

Source: In Hollywood’s Labor Tumult, Directors Stand Apart

TikTok’s latest discovery initiative is a new program for emerging artists, called Elevate, through which TikTok says it plans to “identify the next wave of emerging stars poised to break out in the music industry.” The ByteDance-owned company says that it will provide selected artists “with meaningful support both in-app and out in the world to build careers beyond a single trending hit.”

Source: TikTok launches global ‘Elevate’ rising artists program to ‘identify the next wave of emerging stars’

Existential hand-wringing has always been part of Hollywood’s personality. But the crisis in which the entertainment capital now finds itself is different. Instead of one unwelcome disruption to face — the VCR boom of the 1980s, for instance — or even overlapping ones (streaming, the pandemic), the movie and television business is being buffeted on a dizzying number of fronts. And no one seems to have any solutions.

Source: In Hollywood, the Strikes Are Just Part of the Problem

The Directors’ Guild of America threatened to strike but ended up coming to an agreement, likely because the issue of AI wasn’t on the table. Artificial intelligence can’t quite do the job of organizing the complex social situations that go into making a movie, yet. Writers have protested before AI language models might begin writing whole movies by themselves. But actors find their jobs threatened even now.

Source: How AI is Completely Shutting Down Hollywood

According to sources on both sides, the biggest sticking point is the union’s demand for 2% of the revenue generated by streaming shows. The two sides also remain far apart on basic increases in minimum rates, with the studios offering 5%, 4% and 3.5% across the three years of the contract, while the union is demanding 11%, 4% and 4%. But that only scratches the surface.

Source: SAG-AFTRA Strike: Negotiations Cratered Over AI, Streaming Revenue Sharing, Pay Hikes and More

The board of directors at Access Copyright—the collective management organization duly established by creators and publishers for English-language Canada—made the organization’s most alarming announcement yet, saying that it is initiating “a significant downsizing and restructuring of the organization because of the federal government’s decade-long inaction in fixing Canada’s publishing marketplace.”

Source: Rights Edition: Canada’s Crisis Triggers Downsizing at Access Copyright