The Screen Actors Guild is on strike and, along with the already striking Screenwriters Guild, you can expect big delays before you see any new TV or movies. Jason Bayle is an actor, based in Baton Rouge, who says SAG’s strike is about helping those in the industry who cannot demand multi-million salary deals.
“Wages, residual payments, those kinds of things they just have not kept up with where the costs are for people to actually stay and work in entertainment,” said Bayle.
Bayle says a major issue among SAG members is compensation for work shown on streaming services like Hulu, Prime, or Netflix. He says movies and conventional TV can track ratings, which are used as a basis for pay and residuals. He says streamers treat viewing information as data and generally do not share the info with actors or their agents.
“There’s really no way for you to know if you have a hit show and they use that lack of clarity to suppress your money and it becomes very hard to make any money in the business,” said Bayle.
Bayle says streaming technology is just one potential problem for actors and creative people in being fairly paid. He says artificial intelligence (AI) will further erode performers’ rights to proper compensation and needs to be headed off in strike negotiations. Bayle says, as fall arrives, the effects of the writers’ AND actors’ strikes will soon be felt.
“Where’s the next season of my favorite show, why is it taking 18 months for something like that to come back, then you’ll start to notice it,” said Bayle.
Bayle and others feel the strike and negotiations to resolve it, will take quite some time.
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