Late last night, the Writers Guild of America announced they have reached a tentative agreement with the Hollywood studios. The union’s negotiating committee is calling the deal “exceptional,” but it’s now up to rank-and-file writers to vote on it.
“The Companies agree to provide the Guild, subject to a confidentiality agreement, the total number of hours streamed, both domestically and internationally, of self-produced high budget streaming programs (e.g., a Netflix original series),” the WGA added.
Now, studios will have to provide the WGA with actual data. Specifically “the total number of hours streamed, both domestically and internationally, of self-produced high-budget streaming programs.” That means Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon, and the other streamers won’t be able to invent weird metrics or meaningless self-referential rankings to give to the WGA.
Any news on whether streaming services will have to release view numbers? Still seems like that would be a must for calculating residuals.
This from https://deadline.com/2023/09/wga-strike-officially-end-leaders-approve-tentative-deal-1235556919/ looks promising:
And confirmed! https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/26/23891835/wga-contract-summary-ai-streaming-data