Writers on strike moving to Web

The debate over how to pay writers and split the royalties when their work goes online has been a heated discussion we are sure. I'm sure it is difficult to come up with a fair and agreeable payout, when no one is really sure what the revenues could be or what the future holds for digital content on the web. No big studio or network wants to be locked into a percentage deal or terms, when they have no idea themselves how the content could be used and how much they can make off it. We covered the writer strike before and continue to follow the story today.

So what is a writer supposed to do during this downtime? Well, according to the Los Angeles Times, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure this one out, writers are pursuing deals to develop shows for the web and looking for money to facilitate this creation of content. The development makes us think about what happened in the newspaper industry, when writers during the first dot-com era launched news sites like Salon.com and the like. It's probably not a far fetch that we will see a new wave of companies started in the same manner and an explosion of content created by these writers for video sites on the web.

So is there money out there for a writer to tap into so they can write shows and craft deals of their own. Jim Breyer, a partner at Silicon Valley venture firm Accel Partners and a director at Facebook, told the LA Times that it's "likely" the firm will put some of its cash into some "screenwriter/content-oriented companies" next year.