“What everyone knows screenwriters here’s the thing: the studios have ruined the industry. They took so much from so many screenwriters that made them rich. But what they cannot take away from us is our unity, our solidarity, our common desire to save ourselves and our beloved profession. We hoped to do this through reasoned dialogue. Now we will make it through the race on the road.” With that eloquent wording, the Writers Guild of America officially went on strike yesterday, for the first time in 16 years.

As we reported a few weeks ago, Union Studios and Hollywood Studios could not come to an agreement for a long time to extend the collective labor agreement between them, which expired on May 1, and the negotiations finally broke down. In practice, this means that about 20,000 professionals in the industry stop working indefinitely with unforeseen consequences for the entire cinematic and mostly) TV industry.

But where did the red lines come from? The strikers have two main demands: to establish a minimum participation of 6 to 12 writers in a TV show, depending on the number of episodes. Also, these writers work for a minimum of 10 to 52 weeks per season, again obviously depending on the length of the series. Specific requests are not random. Changes that have taken place in the TV industry with the advent of the crowd streaming platforms over the past three years are structural. Most TV series now have cycles of 8-10 episodes, leaving many of the writers who are paid per episode without regular income or even out of work for most of the year.

But that’s not all. Especially for streaming series that make huge profits, writers are asked to consider the popularity of the respective show in their remuneration. In fact, according to the Union, the cost of both this particular measure and all the others mentioned above reaches $429 million a year, and the annual turnover of the industry (film and television) exceeds $100 billion. Film studios for their part, they are not ready allocate more than 85 million/year.

Then comes artificial intelligence, the use of which scriptwriters require a framework of rules. In particular, T.N. is not allowed to “write or adapt literary content” or be considered a “primary source of content”. In short, technology, which is increasingly used in the creation of scripts, should not take their place. The only thing known now is that the characteristic strike badges have been handed out and the first demonstrations are planned. And according to the first analyzes, the platforms are most at risk from the consequences of mobilizing it Disney And her AppleWith Netflixwhich also has huge international content.