This is too good not to reproduce in full, even though it's been ably framed by HuffPo colleague
Jon Robin Baitz
in his
(and when we say heartfelt, man, do we mean heartfelt! His heart is
feeling
it!). Your heart would feel it, too, if you heard the studios claim that the revenue windfall from digital dissemination of content was still fuzzy, and then turned around and heard them say stuff like this. It does seem obscene that so much profit could be made without some sort of apportionment made for the folks who actually wrote it. Hear it directly from the moguls (does Ben Silverman count as a mogul yet? Answer: Sure he does,
!). Draw your own conclusions below:
- Bob Iger, ABC, on how much of ABC's $35 billion in annual revenue comes from digital: "It's about a billion-five in digital."
- Sumner Redstone, Viacom: "Viacom will double its revenues this year from digital."
- Rupert Murdoch, NewsCorp, on the digital "golden era": "I hope it's a golden era...It is certainly one with golden opportunities."
- Ben Silverman, NBC: "Content is gonna be more and more and more important. We all have PDAs, we all have cellphones with screens, we've all experienced the screens in the back of the taxicab, the screen inside the elevator, and we are one of the best companies in the world at feeding those screens."
- Les Moonves, CBS, on content, digital and otherwise: "But we will get paid for it regardless...we're gonna get paid no matter where you get it from."
Compare and contrast: Here's SNL's take from the Nov. 3/07 episode, which we've featured a clip of before but wouldn't upload in full for fear of bringing down the wrath of NBC upon our heads. Someone else did, though! Brave soul, thanks for that. Here's their take, courtesy of the Silicon Alley Insider:
ETP does not endorse that last line. But man, did that ever remind us of the first time we lost a tooth!
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Read more about the strike on the Huffington Post's writers' strike page.