Devoted to show business and the entertainment industry

The last time there was a writers' strike, 20 years ago, somewhere around 10 percent of those watching network TV never returned. That of course causes us to ask the question on what the impact will be this time. But more importantly, does it really matter anymore?

It's not as simple as some of those that are writing in an attempt to make readers think without the writers everything will fail for the networks in the future. The reason it isn't simple is there is no one Hollywood studio that relies solely on its network business any longer. The one most exposed and closest to that would be CBS (NYSE:CBS-A).

Look for example at ABC (NYSE:DIS), NBC (NYSE:GE), Fox (NYSE:NWS-A) and Viacom (NYSE:VIA-B). They're all global businesses, with income coming in from a wide variety of sources, including the Internet. If many of them were to lose network viewers permanently, many could simply go to other cable channels the parent companies own.

After the last strike that was what many viewers did, they migrated to cable shows. Of course there wasn't an internet at that time, and so the option wasn't there; that's an unknown as to how many viewers begin to go there as their primary source of entertainment. But even if they do, the networks already have a lot of options there as well.

A lot of what the writers' strike has done, was not change the future, but only bring the future closer, as it applies to the traditional media companies. The vast majority of people will end up online for their entertainment in the future, along with checking out the usual variety of cable offerings also.

The new world that's emerging is not so much a television in your living room, but a screen wherever you may go. The networks don't care where the screen is located, only that viewers watch what they put on it.

Even in the short term the strike has spurred some of the networks to experiment and see how a variety of reality shows may work, and even point to a model in the future. It has also caused some of the companies to start to run leaner, always a good thing for the spend-hungry major media companies.

I think what's really happened in the case of the writers, is they'll really weaken themselves with the strike, regardless of what they or the networks hammer out. It seems to me the number of working writers, at least in the official Writers Guild, will never reach the numbers they had before the strike; at least not as far as them working goes.

Regardless of how this is all spun after the deal is struck, I don't think it's the networks that will suffer, it's the writers that revealed their weakness through the changing marketplace that no longer favors them.

So how many viewers will be lost, will overall not matter over the long haul for the studios, although in the short-term it could cause them some pain. But that was going to happen whether there was a writers' strike or not. Again, all the strike has done is hasten the process.

As far as viewers lost so far during the strike, Nielsen said so far in 2008, the numbers have dropped by 21 percent over the same week last year.

Even so, for the month, some of the networks like NBC, say they have been doing well, and Fox had also been up. I'm interested in seeing numbers for the overall month, rather than only the one-week percentage mentioned above.