Hollywood is peaking with global audiences, more shows, platforms and eyeballs than ever in a golden era of distribution and access. How is the streaming revolution going for actors? Well, one actor who played a lead character on a three-season television series that hit a billion global views last year received his residual check: a meager $438, according to Gary Kirk.

The sharing of revenues has worsened with time. When network television was in its prime, a lesser-known actor on a network show could make about $40,000 for one episode, or $20,000 for a cable series. Now actors can appear regularly on a streaming show and not earn enough money — $1,000 an episode — to pay their median rent in Los Angeles, California.

“It’s that vast of a difference,” says Jules Bruff, a Strike Captain at the Walt Disney Studios as part of the SAG-AFTRA union strike that emerged in July this year.

Streaming simultaneously expanded the entertainment business and undermined its old model, but most importantly streaming is facilitating the decline of cable television, as David Leonhardt wrote in a New York Times newsletter on November 15.

“Everybody thinks that actors are just overpaid, spoiled brats in many instances,” says Kirk, a Strike Captain at the Sony Pictures Studios and an actor returning to the film business after working as a sports journalist. The truth is that 86% of SAG-AFTRA actors, most of whom are rank and file, make under $26,000 a year — the minimum needed to qualify for health insurance.

David Zaslav, the Warner Brothers Discovery CEO, has declared current conditions a ‘generational disruption,’ the newsletter reads.

“With streaming, the whole model’s changed. It’s on-demand, it’s global,” says Kirk.

“You know if someone’s on a network show,” or if they write for a network show, says Bruff, “you’re like “they’re doing really well” because that’s where the good money is.”

Technological advancements are presenting new ways for those at the top of the food chain to exploit their prey. The rise of streaming taking over cable channels and, more recently, the latest capabilities of Artificial Intelligence are the two major factors threatening the livelihoods of Hollywood actors.

It isn’t just about the entertainment industry lions milking their actors, however. Disruption is about an industry in decline despite there being more films, viewers and time spent watching than ever before.

TV and Film: From Network to Cable to Streaming

The television and filmmaking industry has gone through various developments, most prominently, network, cable and now streaming.

In network commercials, actors used to get “pay per play” according to Bruff, who has performed in an array of indie films and television series. This meant that every time it played, they would get paid.

Meanwhile, for commercials on cable channels, companies would pay actors an unchanging lump sum for a set period of time during which the commercial could run as frequently as desired without any limits.

This marked the first major reduction in commercial salaries. The advent of cable television caused a big shift in contracts, and actors began receiving smaller payments.

“They’d, let’s say, give you $5,000 for the 13 weeks and they could just blast it as many times as they want”, says Bruff.

Low Streaming Incomes

Streaming involves access to TV shows, radio broadcasts, or podcasts over the internet or on internet-connected devices.

When the internet gained popularity in the late 1990s and the film industry began using it as a distribution tool, compensation contracts continued a trend that undermined pay. Afterwards, when streaming came in, it “got underneath that internet contract and made its way,” says Bruff. “It’s its own thing.”

“There was no precedent,” adds Bruff.

Streaming companies did not automatically sign up to pay actors as much as was typical for a network or cable television show, “which [was] a great living,” adds Bruff. Instead, the sentiment was, “Let’s pay you what we want to pay you.”

The streaming model is based on subscribers, and companies can easily track who viewers are as well as when and from where something is being watched with digital user accounts.

In discussing the fact that streaming platforms don’t publicize viewership statistics, Kirk mentions that their claim for not doing so is “because [they’re] not really sure”. He adds, “That’s just a ruse because they know exactly who, where, when and how long.”

“The studios have shown huge resistance to sharing those numbers and sharing the revenue proportionally with the entertainers,” says Kirk.

The SAG-AFTRA strike emerged as an accompanying reaction to the Writers Guild of America strike earlier this year and campaigned nearly identical issues; both unions were side-by-side for the first time in 63 years.

The combination of the economy, technology, unemployment, and inflation versus salary growth pushed US entertainment players beyond the breaking point. This impetus drove the strike which was a reaction to several years of mounting disruption until artists communicated, successfully for the moment, that they had almost nothing to lose anymore.

Bruff had been asking A-listers to sponsor food trucks in order to feed the picketers. Speaking to an actor on a highly successful streaming show that ran for seven seasons, she asked about whether he and his cast would be able to sponsor a food truck. The actor replied, “If any of us had any money.”

Artificial Intelligence Replacements

AI has been quietly working in the background for some time now, but with cloning facial and vocal likenesses it is as though they “let open Pandora’s box”, according to Bruff.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is a trade association that represents over 350 production companies, including giants such as Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures as well as streamers like Netflix, Amazon and Apple TV.

The latest evolution of AI in the technological landscape poses a threat of taking over human jobs. For actors, this plays out by scanning and capturing an actor’s likeness, facially and vocally, merely one time to reproduce in any way countlessly. For filmmakers, this could mean having AI generate entire scenes and backgrounds.

With such new AI capabilities, the AMPTP is seeking to maximize its profits as much as (in)humanly possible. To the proposition of “the AMPTP wanting to pay [actors] half a day’s wage and to own our likeness in perpetuity, to what… put us out of a job?” says Michelle C. Bonilla, a Los Angeles board member for SAG-AFTRA and Strike Captain at Disney, she states, “I don’t think so.”

“For actors who still have our likenesses and our sound and our voices to contend with, that is a much deeper issue and an issue that is paramount to the existence of an actor,” adds Bonilla.

Actors still fear AI subsuming their incomes which are already hanging by a thread; they need to be compensated in a way that sustains their lives. “We don’t want computers, technology to take our jobs,” says Bruff. “But even if we keep our jobs, it’s not enough to make a living on.”

Although the deal that was agreed on that ended the strike was a success, it only accounts for the next three years and does not commit studios and streamers to provide true job security for actors in the long run.

To Bruff, it is unsurprising that workers at grocery stores, ticket booths, and background actors in general are the first to be replaced by AI.

Automation (as with banking machines and digital ticket booths) was the initial stage of what is now referred to as AI. Computers replace increasingly complex roles formerly held by humans — that has been the natural development of technology over the decades.

But now the fear is that digital creations of individuals which are wholly modeled on the bodies and faces of actors themselves, will replace the actor. The key factor now is the increasing sophistication in the perceived emotion of such human-inspired replicas.

Another actor and SAG-AFTRA Strike Captain at Disney, Demetri Belardinelli, says “Our position on AI is extremely important, not just for this industry because that affects every industry.”

Anastasia Kasimos, a fellow SAG-AFTRA Strike Captain at Sony Pictures Studios, echoes such sentiments and believes that whatever outcome protesters achieve “is kind of going to set a global precedent” with regard to AI.

“I believe the research shows that it’s coming for management and law departments next, at the same folks who” had to cross picket lines to go to work, adds Belardinelli. “They could be next.”

Beyond Hollywood

AI has made great progress in many fields from complex assembly lines to grocery store checkouts to parking attendants, and, increasingly food delivery and taxis. The American model of capitalism facilitates disruption as part of a long evolution that was initially mechanical before it became digital.

However, with technological improvements this process has been speeding up in recent years. From automated and miniaturized cameras to streaming platforms that allow for the seamless delivery of endless digital content to, now, sophisticated AI.

The Foreseeable Future

The recent SAG-AFTRA strike, which concluded on November 9, resulted in a new contract, minimum compensation increases, protections from AI, and a streaming participation bonus, according to the union’s website.

However, the tentative agreement reached will expire and need to be revisited in about three years. The fears that underscored the strikes, although subdued for now, are still lurking and omnipresent.

Nonetheless, for Bruff, one of the few guarantees for employees of her industry is to make demands in solidarity as a form of protection as they charge into the future. She says, “There’s power in collective bargaining.”