This is the closest to the current model, and in my mind, is fair to both employers and employees. It still means that the more successful a commercial (and hence, the performers in the commercial for accomplishing the commercial’s goals), the more the performers involved are paid. If the JPC balks at this, they are being foolish.

Of course, we struck for 6 months in 2000, largely because we (SAG & AFTRA) wanted to finally bring “pay for play” (residuals) to the cable market, and the JPC wanted to do away with pay-for-play residuals on network. We wanted to take the network model to cable and they wanted to take the cable model to network. And when we came back from the strike, the status quo was maintained.

The industry will maintain that there is no way to track video usage online. That isn’t true. As a new media producer, using feedburner (now folded into Google analytics, and still FREE), I could tell you that 7 people in Auckland watched my video one day, and that 10 people in Los Angeles did the next.

We must preserve use of actors’ images to promote product. Actors in successful commercials are due to be paid more for use of that image. The more we, actors, are tied to a product, the less attractive we are to get work for other products.

Note the significant difference in the commercial realm: While session payment is comparable to TV-Theatrical, the big commercial money is in the usage fees — something like a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio. That’s why the advertisers have such an incentive to make the usage fees work in a satisfactory manner. By contrast, in TV-Theatrical, there has historically been about a 1:1 ratio in session fees to residuals, and I get the impression that the ratio may be dropping as residuals decline. Thus, the compensation challenge in TV-Theatrical is of a wholly different nature from commercials.

Nonetheless, it would be worthwhile for SAG (and AFTRA) to take steps to try to get ahead of the curve.

VG

Intriguing idea.