Writers Guild Members Look to Internet Distribution

stevedcc writes "The Guardian is running an article about members of the Writer's Guild, still on strike, creating their own ventures to deliver content over the internet. The intention is to get their work to consumers while bypassing the movie studios. Their effort will include actors and directors, and it is not the first step they have taken to expand their interests during the strike. One particular project is said to include A-list talent, and will be released in roughly 50 daily segments before going to DVD. This is also relevant to the strike because, as the article states, 'at the core of the current dispute is the question of how to reimburse writers for work that is distributed on the internet.'"

Comments

Whoops, reposting with paragraphs.

[SanityInAnarchy]

There are MANY subtitle formats, and MANY container formats.

As for "getting paid enough", you obviously haven't been following the story. It's not that they're not getting paid enough, it's that they're not getting paid fairly. This is an industry where individual actors can be paid millions of dollars, so there is absolutely no excuse to cut the writers out. But your credibility goes away when we remember that the writers are "whining" about not getting paid, and you're whining about not being entertained -- I wonder which is more important?

But back to the issue at hand... I can put SRT, SSA, ASS, even VOBSUB, combined with pretty much any audio/video format (personal favorite is h.264 for video, and one of vorbis/aac/ac3 or even FLAC for audio), into a Matroska (MKV) file. Or, I can download any container format, even an AVI, if someone is willing to distribute subtitles with it -- I've currently been watching Battlestar Galactica in XVid and AC3 in an AVI container, and I hear well enough not to need subtitles, but it also came with Danish, English, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish subtiles, all in separate SRT files.

There's also the stupid fansubs which embed subtitles in the video itself, but the reason I mention these other formats is, they allow subtitles to be easily distributed with every file. No one's going to bother to strip subtitles out of the mkv, which means that even if 99% of us don't turn them on, you'll be able to, no matter where you get the file from.

So, if you're going to complain about a lack of closed-captioning, don't do it here on Slashdot. Take it to the projects which are planning to do this online distribution. Tell them about formats like Matroska, or at least SRT. But to pretend that the Internet is less "accessible" just because most people are lazy and only throw things on YouTube is a bit insulting to anyone who works on these formats.