What do the entertainment industry writers' strike and high-definition video disks have in common? They both show that there really is no business like show business.

Most businesses tend to regard innovation and new technologies as great opportunities for growth. General Electric's catch phrase, for example, used to be "progress is our most important product" (and the current one is "imagination at work").

Not Hollywood. That's where fear of the future is the most important product.

As has been widely reported, the writers union is on strike because the studios do not want to pay the writers royalties on Internet distribution of their work. Writers now get paid ("residuals," in industry parlance) each time a TV show or movie is seen on traditional media, which is to say theaters, TV, cable, DVDs and so on. But the entertainment industry refuses to do so regarding the Internet.

Buy a DVD of the last year's season of "Lost" and the writers get a piece of the action. But buy the same collection on the iTunes Music Store and the writers are left out in the cold.

This might not add up to a lot of money today. But clearly online distribution is the wave of the future. So this is tantamount to trying to cut the writers out of any future income streams. I do not profess to be an expert on Hollywood, but I do have friends and relatives who have worked in show business. Based on that anecdotal evidence, my sense is that outside of a small handful of superstars and top-level journeymen, "working" in the entertainment industry is a pretty iffy business. People are not working more often than they are - making those residuals a matter of survival through the lean years.

Ironically, even while the strike drags on, Hollywood is bogged down in an equally ridiculous fight over HD video formats.

A much publicized recent development was Warner Bros.'s announcement that it would distribute its high-definition DVD releases exclusively in the Blu-ray format. Analysts see this as potentially breaking the stalemate between Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD-DVD technologies. Because the two technologies are incompatible and require different players, consumer acceptance has been slow.

Competition in this arena has not been good for consumers. Except for the most daring and deep-pocketed early adopters, people have been loath to commit to either format.

And justifiably so. I was one of those years ago who thought Beta VCRs were great, only to see my players and tapes turn into museum pieces. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. This time around, I am happy to let the electronics and entertainment conglomerates work out the DVD issue among themselves and then get back to me.

Were common sense to prevail, the entertainment industry would settle on one of the formats and end the stalemate. Ah, but it's show biz. Sony also owns movie/TV studios (and a record label), which means some Hollywood competitors are wary of doing something that might give the Sony folks a little competitive edge. But mostly, according to various news reports, it has been a matter of simple greed. The studios have chosen between Blu-ray and HD-DVD based mainly on the financial terms being offered by the electronics companies. Paying heed to consumer needs did not figure much in any of the calculations.

As a result, thousands of Americans received bright new HDTVs this past holiday season, but hooked them up to their old low-definition DVD players because of the unresolved high-def video war. To get their HD movie fix, the favored solution is the growing supply of "on demand" showings from cable and satellite providers.

HD video disks, in fact, could turn out to be a delivery system that's obsolete before it ever gets off the ground. Why, after all, schlep to a video store or deal with a mail video service with its inherent time lag when you can achieve instant gratification by just pushing a couple of buttons on your cable box's remote control? Or, in an alternative now just starting to emerge, simply download the content from the Internet to a hard drive connected to your HDTV?

Which takes us back to the issues in the writers' strike. Not only do the writers have to worry about losing future income, the format conflict has undercut current sources of income.

As for consumers like us, well let's not hold our breath waiting for much in the way of new scripted productions after the February sweeps, or for anything much in the way of wide distribution of high-def videos to take up the slack. Unless you are a big fan of reruns and reality shows, your entertainment future is looking pretty bleak.

But, hey, that's show biz.

nnn

Al Gordon is a Massachusetts-based writer who specializes in technology and consumer electronics. You can read more of his articles at www.algordon.com/techblog.html and e-mail him at eagle@algordon.com.