Comedian Andrew Schulz sent out five tweets, Friday, which dealt the most devastating blow to mainstream Hollywood.
Schulz, best known for being funny as heck and not giving a crap, shared five different tweets regarding his thoughts on the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America strikes. He started by assessing the situation: "the real issue is that actors and writers want fair residual payments from [streaming services]," but to be able to develop a metric for a share of those residual payments, streaming services first have to release the data on how many folks are actually watching their shows.
"My suspicion is that the streamers are refusing to share the viewership [numbers]'s NOT because they're being cheap BUT because no one is watching AND revealing extremely low viewership would kill the stock price," Schulz continued."If most of these streamers are losing money in an effort to gain market share the ONLY justification for their spending is their stock price being high."
"So SAG and the WGA may have absolutely screwed themselves and their industry by fighting for key metrics on actual streaming viewership. If these companies don't have the number of viewers they suggest they do, then admitting this would tank their stock, and guarantee that thousands of writers and actors never get their chance in the ever-dimming spotlight.
If streaming companies do have the views, then the additional money they'll have to fork out for actors would also mean a drastic cut-back on shows, Schulz argued.
"If the actors and directors strike is successful by making the streamers release their real viewership... The strike will essentially force the streamers to hire less actors and directors. So they're striking themselves out of work," he concluded. And it is almost impossible to argue with his logic.
Making this theory more plausible is the fact that stock prices, particularly for tech stocks, are based chiefly on speculative value -- how much you think you can sell the stock for later -- and barely at all on actual revenues the stocks yield through dividend payments to owners. For decades, tech companies have been valuated not upon their present market value but for their potential future value.
This is based on the huge increases in value for the tech companies that ultimately made money-- FaceBook, Amazon, etc. No one ever seems to think about the hundreds of tech plays that were money-losing disasters, like PetsDotCom.
And for some reason Wall Street has been treating legacy media companies as hot new tech companies with massive possible future growth.
Now, I know stocks in media companies are not "tech stocks." Trouble is, Wall Street and investors don't seem to know that. They've been treating sad old yesterday's-news media companies as "tech" companies merely because part of their programming is offered through streaming, which feels "kinda techie" to these midwits.
Ford cars have minicomputers in them. Is Ford a tech company too?
Book publishers offer books for electronic download on ebooks like Kindle. Is Random House a tech company now?
So with the values of companies, particularly the non-tech "tech companies" of the media dependent so heavily on speculated, imaginary value, rather than on verifiable deliverables such as dividend payments, it becomes even more crucial to hide any evidence that the speculated, phantasmal "value" of these companies isn't real. Ratings must he sealed in a Black Box so that the bubble of over-puffed imaginary value is never punctured by the sharp sting of hard numbers.