Some more details from Liz Gannes over at NewTeeVee about the efforts of movie writer Aaron Mendelsohn and some fellow striking writers to put together a mini-studio to produce Web content. They’re looking for VCs to put up $30-million or so to launch their studio, Virtual Artists — a name that appears to be a reference to United Artists, the seminal 1920s studio founded by Charlie Chaplin and others.

Incidentally, it’s worth remembering, as Paul Kafka points out at Silicon Alley Insider, that United Artists didn’t work out so well, in part because movies became longer and more expensive to produce. Most of those who formed the studio were also well-known actors — in other words, the “talent,” and not just a bunch of writers whom most of Hollywood (rightly or wrongly) assumes are a dime a dozen.

So will Mendelsohn and his gang be able to follow through on what Marc Andreessen recently described as the remaking of Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s image? That remains to be seen. Kafka worries that the economics of Web video are uncertain at best and there is certainly some evidence that that is true. But why does it always have to be a black and white question of Web vs. traditional TV and movies?

With Quarterlife, Marshall Hersovitz and Ed Zwick have shown that there can be a lot of overlap between TV and Web video, in both directions. Meanwhile, some comedians, actors and directors who started with short video clips — Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island crew come to mind — have managed to extend that into more traditional (and presumably lucrative) spheres. To me it seems a lot more like a continuum than a black and white separation of worlds.

We appear to have two data points related to online video that are worth paying attention to. Number one: According to the BBC, Nielsen says that traffic to some online video sites has doubled since the Hollywood writers’ strike in October turned the TV into a wasteland of reruns and unfunny late-night talk shows (although it may be stretching things to call the Nielsen figure a data point, since I can’t find a report that has those numbers in it).

The second data point is a report from the Pew Internet Research project, a reliable and independent research group, indicates that almost 50 per cent of those surveyed had been to video-sharing sites such as YouTube (up from 38 per cent last year) and daily traffic to such sites has doubled in the past year. The number of people who said they had been to such a site within a day of being asked almost doubled to 15 per cent.

Ever since the strike began, there has been a debate about how much of a benefit online video might get as the fresh content on television became more and more scarce. Some have argued that most online video is crap, and therefore the boost would likely be minimal. Others argue that much of what is on TV is also crap, although the production values might be slightly higher, and that the strike might help to push some content creators to remake the industry in Silicon Valley’s image.

I don’t know where things will end up, but I do know one thing: I am hearing from more and more “average” people — i.e., not geeks — that they are watching more video online, and that they are finding things there they can’t on television (and some they can). The writers’ strike may be one of the forces that are pushing people to do that, but it’s not the only one. Increasingly, the boundaries between TV and online are blurring.

(this is cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

As the strike by Hollywood TV and movie writers drags on, one question that keeps popping up is whether the strike is a boon for online content. The short answer is that it’s impossible to say for sure. Will the strike be one of those turning points for online media, as the previous strike in 1988 was for reality TV and satellite programming? No one knows. But one thing is pretty clear: writers like to write, and if they can’t write for television or movies then they will write for the Web.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, several writers have signed on to create a Web-based comedy series for Worldwide Biggies, a digital studio run by former MTV Networks executive Albie Hecht, the creator of Spike TV. The writers have experience working on shows such as “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” VH1′s “Best Week Ever,” and “Saturday Night Live.” They will share in the revenue from the series, which Hecht said could be posted on a dedicated site or distributed through a portal.

The report also mentions that former News Corp. executive Ross Levinsohn has discussed funding writers who are on strike but want to do online projects, through a venture Levinsohn has called Velocity Interactive Corp., which he co-founded with former AOL head Jonathan Miller and recently merged with a venture capital firm called ComVentures.

On his investment blog, hedge-fund manager Barry Ritholtz wrote recently that the strike could be a tipping point, and that Silicon Valley VCs could see it as an opportunity to start getting into the content business. As he puts it: “The TV studios have already lost. The VCs will find a business model that works on the cheap, and begin competing with the studios, even if the strike is settled tomorrow. I suspect that Television, as we know it, is now officially over.”

Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put forward a similar theory on his blog recently, first in a post entitled Suicide by Strike and then in a follow-up post called Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s Image. In Andreessen’s view, the arrival of the Web means (as it has for the music industry) that while distribution costs have fallen virtually to zero, production costs have also fallen dramatically, and that means the number of potential competitors is theoretically limitless. Whether that increases or decreases the amount of quality content out there is another question, of course.

A recent L.A. Times piece looked at a number of writers who have been pursuing a Web strategy as a way of keeping their creative juices flowing — and also of increasing the amount of creative and financial control they have, another of Andreessen’s major themes — including Aaron Mendelsohn, co-creator of the Air Bud movies. Groups of like-minded artists have formed and are looking for venture financing, using a model not unlike the original United Artists studio in the 1920s by Charlie Chaplin and several other prominent stars.

Funny or Die, a comedy-video portal founded by SNL star Will Ferrell that now includes content from filmmaker Judd Apatow and others, recently got $15-million in funding from several venture capital groups, although a profile in Portfolio magazine pointed out that the site has yet to achieve the same amount of traffic its first hit (Ferrell’s Landlord sketch) achieved. Some skeptics, meanwhile, have argued that Web content isn’t going to replace TV content anytime soon, for a number of reasons.

Like my friend, the charming and multi-talented Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post’s Eat The Press, I think it’s great that blogger Nikki Finke of LA Weekly is getting her moment in the spotlight — courtesy of the U.S. Writers Guild strike, which Nikki has been covering like white on rice. Both the New York Times and Bloomberg have positive pieces about the blogger and her coverage of the strike.

Deadline Hollywood Daily didn’t just show up yesterday. It’s a daily online version of Ms. Finke’s LA Weekly column, and she’s been writing it since March of last year. It’s published by the Village Voice, which hosts the site and pays her to write it. It’s also interesting to note that the NYT story was written by Brian Stelter, whose TVNewser blog brought him fame and fortune while he was still a student, at which point the NYT hired him as one of their media reporters.

(Note: This is cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

“Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,” Mark Twain reportedly said, by which he presumably meant that one should think twice before making a writer or journalist mad. In Hollywood, the writers who create most of our TV shows and movies (and yes, I’m including Canada in that) are definitely mad, and they are showing it by doing what they do best: writing.

Some are writing opinion pieces for traditional media such as the New York Times and Newsweek, while others are taking their case online. Thanks to the Internet, writers can not only whip together and publish a blog for virtually nothing, but can also create and upload video to promote their case against the big studios and TV networks.

On the Web, in other words, ink doesn’t just come by the barrel; it’s virtually unlimited, and almost free. And it gives the writers a powerful platform to advance their case that they didn’t have during their last strike in 1989.

It’s more than a little ironic, in fact, that the very tools content owners are using to generate new revenue — which the writers say they are being denied a share of — are the same tools writers are using to get their message out. One of the central gathering points for strike information online is UnitedHollywood, a blog created by several union organizers with the Writers Guild, which keeps track of commentary both online and off about the strike, including videos and photo galleries.

The site features a video by the writers of The Daily Show, the popular satirical news show, in which the writers put on a version of the show from a desk set up in the middle of a picket line. Another video from the writers of The Colbert Report is a hilarious satire of a studio executive.

Other videos from the picket line include one that features an interview with the showrunner (or senior writer) from Everybody Hates Chris, in which he is joined by former child actor Todd Bridges, as well as one with comedian Sarah Silverman and several of the actors from her new show.

Other stars who show up in videos linked to from UnitedHollywood include Ray Romano, Jason Alexander, Zach Braff, Nicolette Sheridan, Ben Stiller, Sally Field and director-producer Garry Marshall. Many of the videos are also linked to from a strikers’ blog called StrikePoints. Most of the videos have been uploaded to a channel on YouTube, and several of them have gotten 5,000 views or more in just one or two days. One video featuring the writers from The Office has gotten almost 500,000 views in less than a week and has over a thousand comments.

In the video by the team from The Daily Show, the writers do pretty much the same thing they do on the show itself: they create a pseudo news-clip that pokes fun at an important issue, but that also manages to sneak in a bunch of facts in order to make a real point.

The point of that video and others on the site is that the corporations behind the major studios and TV networks are telling shareholders and analysts one thing about online revenues, and telling writers another. While the videos are amusing, the quotes that they use from executives such as Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and CEO Phillipe Dauman — in addition to the slides that are included from various corporate presentations to investors and analysts — are fairly damning.

In a nutshell, the major media conglomerates have promised hundreds of millions of dollars in extra revenue from online and digital media such as “webisodes,” cellphone clips, streaming Web video and other services. In negotiations with the Guild, however, the companies in charge of the talks say digital media is too new to be able to gauge what kind of revenue might be available in the future, and so are promising very little.

Although the strike is only a week old, all the online lobbying by writers seems to be working: According to an article in Variety, two surveys show that writers have the support of more than 60 per cent of the people surveyed, while the studios and networks have the support of less than 10 per cent.