WGA Strike Gives Birth to Strike.TV

I don't know if you had your calendar marked, but yesterday might have been the most important date in the history of online video. It was the date that Strike.TV went live. Stike.TV is a video site that offers original content from WGA members. It was dreamt up during the depths of the WGA strike and the results are amazing. The production standards are far higher than anything else on the internet, and it introduces a business model that is going to revolutionize how online video is produced and sold. Though the first day viewership numbers were mild by YouTube standards, I think we just witnessed a launch that changed the world.

I had a chance to interview Michael Tabb, Supervising Producer and Head of Submissions at Strike.TV and here is what he had to say:

What is Strike.TV?

As artists we're now allowing ourselves a canvas on which to paint.

How did Strike.TV come about?

(Strike.TV, CEO) Peter Hyoguchi is a friend and he did Interviewing Hollywood online, and he's done a lot of online content. And he's also a filmmaker that won at the San Francisco and New York Film Festivals with a feature about a homeless mother and daughter in Santa Barbara (“First, Last and Deposit”). I've written on and off with Peter for two years. We were in the middle of the strike, and Peter was gung-ho on making something new happen. Time demands a change from the old model and the old guard. We love being in business with big studios and doing things their way, but at the same time we wanted to open doors for ourselves. So I pointed Peter to Jim Cooper who had done this small piece about why the writers were striking titled "Why We Fight", who was on my picket line. Through Jim he met Ian Deitchman (Stike.TV, Head of Programming).

You can picture eight writers sitting around, on the floor or on chairs, deciding how we are going to do something with all of this time and talent not being utilized. People got brought in on all sides, and a key integration came with Brian Rodda (Strike.TV, Production Manager) who's an actor with tech savvy. People carved out niches for themselves. Rebecca Hughes is running viral marketing. Ken Lazebnik organized a Strike.TV open house with speakers on the business model and filled the Writer’s Guild Theater (almost 600 seats) with writers, directors, actors, cinematographers all wanting to play a part in this idea of carving out a new distribution and testing model for fresh material. People were lining the aisles and sitting on the ground. That’s when we knew we had hit on a nerve. We brought in a slew of professionals. And everybody donated their time to work on this, for free, to help make Strike.TV happen. To this day, I have not been paid a dime for all my efforts.

Was it an exciting time?

It's one of those revolutionary moments, when a new means to get something done comes at a time when the way you've always done it before doesn't seem to be an option. The advent of broadcast quality HD cameras for $3400 and an internet that can take you into every household in America gives Hollywood professionals an opportunity they've never had before. It allows us to take material we hold near and dear to our hearts and see where it stands in the marketplace, on our own terms.

Feature film writers like me are very much used to putting our heart and soul into something, then we're kind of cut out of the process. Once it moves into production it becomes 100% out of our control. It's like giving birth to a baby, breast feeding it for the first year of life, putting your whole heart into it, loving it, and then giving it to someone else to raise. It's a necessary, wonderful process that brings together artists of a written and visual nature, but sometimes there's just an idea that I feel that I should direct because it is so based on my life. No one could answer the questions about these characters the way I could answer them. Strike.TV offers me the opportunity to follow through on that.

How does it work when a writer drives the project (as opposed to a director)?

More like TV, I assume, where that kind of thing is natural. What a director brings to a project is cinematic vision and scope. In our case, if the writer has a great cinematographer, s/he can focus more on the personal elements of the stories. At the same end, some writers went to film school and have the skill set to direct in the more traditional sense. So some writers are using this opportunity on Strike.TV to take the reins of their own material. Yet other writers bring in their own directors and do it just to see their own stuff made by someone else. It really depends on the project and the writer.

We have filmmakers with high concept ideas, really fun shows, and they just want to do it themselves. They don't want to wait for the agent to like the script, and then wait for the production company to get on board, and then wait for them to cast it, and then get a director and then see the director go off and do what they want to do with it. That development process works for many projects, but isn’t necessary for everything. As a filmmaker who dominantly writes feature films, and I truly enjoy the collaborative way Hollywood does things, once in a while you just want to not wait (and wait and wait and wait). You hunger for the film school days of just picking up a camera and shooting something. This is an experience I for one have been starving for and missing, ever since I got out of film school and into this business a decade ago.

What is the role of the Supervising Producer at Strike TV?

It started during the strike; writers went off to shoot their films, so I would keep tabs on them, to make sure things were being done on time so we could launch. The landscape is going to change since we are not in the middle of the strike. Now I am going to be running submissions, so we can keep finding professional filmmakers who want to be heard and seen.

What is the submission process?

We hope to launch our submission page next month allowing new shows and filmmakers a chance to be seen and heard. A chief participant has to be a WGA, DGA or SAG member to get your material on our site. Everybody loves YouTube, but we want to do something slightly different, to bridge the gap between YouTube and NBC. We want to be the United Artists of the web; artists coming together and making their own studio and distribution house.

If you'd like to find out about union contracts for online programming, the WGA contact is Elizabeth Flack (eflack@wga.org). We also encourage SAG membership, the SAG contact is Joanna Mamey (jmamey@sag.org). The DGA contact is Michael Zeeck.

What is the development process like?

One of the best things about our site is that we don't give writers development notes. You can ask for help, but the idea is to let an artist create their own canvas and not tell them how to do it. We can reinvent what works on the largest playground in the world, the net. With the exception of explicit, adult content it’s an unlimited canvas with no network rules. We are about artistic integrity and the individual artist's voice, unfiltered. We are not marketing to the lowest common denominator. Some shows will have big audiences; some shows will have small audiences. Also Strike.TV allows all its filmmakers to seek out interest from production companies based on the attention we garnish them, and they have the right to take their content elsewhere. That previous success will allow the filmmaker more say in the final product (in the case of a sale) than they would have otherwise. They can say (as a result of the Strike.TV viewership) that the audience wants this show the way they did it, and that will allow the filmmaker to maintain his vision (if the show is picked up). Then you don't have to kowtow to the powers that be in the same way. And let’s be clear, I have nothing against the powers that be. The powers that be do what they know works, and that's what they should do given the amount of money they've put into everything. All we're doing at Strike.TV is allowing artists to come up with another way of doing things and see if that works and develop that business model.

How many shows do you have?

We have 40 shows, and 200 episodes are ready to go. We'll be rolling them out every week, which means something new for viewers every week (sometimes twice a week). Kick it at the office on your lunch break eating in your cubicle and watch a new show. Then run to the water cooler and ask your friends if they saw the new “Chucky” creator’s horror pilot “5 or Die” that launched on Strike.TV this week.

How many episodes of each show are produced?

The filmmaker makes his or her own product. We don't finance the films at this time just like we don't tell you how to make it. From example the creator of "lonelygirl15" has already shot 36 episodes (of With the Angles). She knows how to do it.



Then we have "Speedy Date", it's a speed dating scenario. You met these ten couples, and you drop in on each conversation. It's a wonderful character study about relationships, love, everything you'd want and he's already shot 10 episodes.

That said, one of my personal dreams and goals for Strike.TV is to fund shows ourselves. As Strike.TV grows an audience, it translates into more advertising dollars aimed at our site. I see a time in the future where we produce shows entirely through ad support advance sales. We want an advertiser to say "I want a pre-roll before your show before it airs".

What is the business model?

For the first three months all the profits are going to charity. We saw an economic hardship coming and we knew we had to do something about that. While we ramp the viewership up, the funds are going to charity. In three months, the idea is that we'll have more advertising dollars and the advertisers will pick the shows they want to advertise on. Strike.TV will share the advertising revenue directly with the filmmakers.

We need to take enough to keep our network going and pay them for all the time, encoding, etc. We are doing a revenue split with the filmmaker. They will get a good share of the proceeds after we've paid out third parties.

Who are the third parties?

We started making deals with several online companies. We're putting our shows on YouTube, Joost and TIVO. And more deals are currently in the works.

Will you get a split from YouTube revenue (i.e. the YouTube Partner model)?

YouTube gets paid for ads on their site before Strike.TV gets a cut, which we split with filmmakers. For ad revenue on our own site, we have outsource people doing ad sales that have to get paid before us as well. These are the third parties that get a cut before we get cut in. Once revenue gets to Strike.TV, we still want to give the artists a bigger share than what we get.

Your encode quality appears to be really high. Who are your partners?

Bit Gravity and Episodic technology. These players have been designed to show HD quality online. It's as good as the internet gets. It takes an enormous amount of bandwidth. For bandwidth costs we're looking at six figures a month.

What kind of viewership numbers are you seeing?

There were well over 16,000 views of the shows just the first day.

Do you have a show in the pipeline?

Yes, it's called Shadow Academy. It's animated. I've worked with Stan Lee a couple times and I'm a big fan of his. This show is kind of dark and twisted. The concept is "Where do all the missing children go?" In the show they're drafted into a program and put into the Shadow Academy. They're going to be turned into devices for our government. So instead of this happy little story where you have special powers and you go to a wizard academy, these are the kids that nobody loves nor wants and they're going to screw with their DNA and give them powers that they may not want. It features Corey Haim, Miguel Ferrer, Stephen Root and funnyman Brian Posehn.

What animation package are you using?

We're using Photoshop and After Effects. We have some amazing artists, all volunteers. I could always use more help – hint, hint. Some of the animators are still in school, others are working pros. And all the actors came in and did it for free too. They know that the first three months of profit is going to charity.

Who's helped you out along the way?

The original team members are Peter Hyoguchi (CEO), Ian Deitchman (Head of Programming), Ken Lazebnik (Events Coordinator, "Star Trek: Enterprise"), Rebecca Hughes (Head of Viral Marketing), Chip Proser ("Top Gun", "Innerspace"), Lester Lewis ("The Office"), Julie Rayhanabad (Head of PR), Brian Rodda (Production Manager), Patrick Francis (Documentarian and Film Historian), Andy Dijak (Art Director), Doug Powell (Web Technology), Terance Coles (Ad Sales), Chris Barrett of MTA (SVP), Scott Schlichter of Dogma (Encoding), Hannah O'Malley (Webmaster), Michael O’Neil (Web-related Services), Matt Enlow (Viral), Andrew Deitchman (Ad Agency, Mother New York) and Warren Lazerow (Legal, O'Melveny & Meyers).

What lessons have you learned?

The coolest thing about this is that you learn for the first time what it takes once writers are out of the project. Getting my own hands dirty again. Now we are involved with assembling all the stuff that needs assembling. For a film writer this is totally foreign.

Bumping into one of my favorite character actors alive today, Stephen Root, on the picket lines and taking it upon myself to convince him that being in my little Strike.TV show for free is a great idea… It’s a mind blowing experience.

Work for the man and love it as I do, but take the time to do things for yourself as well. You can do both. But sometimes to get work from the man, you need to show them what you can do first without them. Hence, Strike.TV. Carpe diem, my friends

Watch Strike.TV for the launch of their show submissions page, due up in November.