The people who have gone for so long without fresh comedies and dramas on their large-screen TVs and wall-mounted plasmas can finally splash with abandon in new episodes of Ugly Betty and How I Met Your Mother. We are at last saved from reruns and even more reality television.
The question lingering in the back of everyone's mind, however, is not how much compensation writers and other creative types will get from new media channeling and whether it is enough to keep a future strike at bay. The question is has the content-starved public learned - by going cold turkey - that there are other avenues and channels of entertainment out there besides traditional broadcasting. This includes the hundreds of thousands if not millions of video snippets that are zapped across the Internet each day and channeled to stationary PCs, mobile phones and wireless personal entertainment devices.
The viewing public, driven by their own blood lust for fresh content, has turned to the Internet and discovered that some of the stuff out there is actually quite good. Television executives have also caught the scent of a new community and are taking a serious look at rising new stars in new media. A few are even being offered a shot at the big time, since the challenge now is to bring back all those distracted viewers who have wandered far from the corral in search of greener content pastures.
One of these new stars is Jodie Rivera, also known as "The Venetian Princess", a 23-year-old video blogger with a knack for creating clever and professional artsy videos and celebrity parodies. Her videos have been viewed more than 6.5 million times on YouTube, where her channel has well over 21,000 subscribers. Her talents have not only helped her win a national talent contest sponsored by Samsung Telecommunications America Inc. (and $10,000 in studio equipment), but has also reportedly attracted meeting offers from the likes of NBC and others, who recognize the power of grassroots entertainment.
If I were a scriptwriter packing up my pencils and story-line index cards to go back to work I would be more than a bit concerned over the Pandora's Box opened by the strike. Just as the Gutenberg Press and movable clay type allowed the great unwashed masses to wrest the power of books and reading away from the upper class, the lack of fresh episodes of House or Two and a Half Men may have tipped the scales in favor of a new media revolution.
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