WHEN Keira Knightley takes to the red carpet for next month’s Golden Globe awards, the British star may face an unusual, and hostile audience. Instead of fans and paparazzi, the star of Atonement could be facing 3,000 angry writers.

The Writers’ Guild of America has been on strike for close to two months in a dispute over its members’ share of digital rights. So far few outside the industry have noticed, but in the new year that looks set to change.

A picket at the Golden Globes will be followed by one at the Oscars, the union has warned. Those who turn up for the awards, either to hand them out or receive them, will be forced to ad-lib their lines after the union vowed it would not allow members to write for the shows. It promises to make an interesting spectacle. This year’s Oscar host, comedian Jon Stewart, got mixed reviews last time he was the event’s MC two years ago. And that time it was with a script.

Nor are there any guarantees that the usual star-studded crowd will be in attendance. The actors’ union the Screen Actors Guild is gearing up for its own negotiations with film producers next year and stars are showing firm support for striking writers. Presenters, or even nominees, may decide to stay at home.

If the strike isn’t over by Oscar time, it won’t just be Stewart who is left without his lines. New seasons of TV shows look set to be cancelled or cut in half by the strike. The new season of Lost, Disney’s worldwide hit, is due back on January 31, but may be cut short halfway through its run.

Richard Greenfield, media analyst at Pali Research, said the strike would have a “substantial” impact on the TV business come February. “Shows that people were watching are going to go dark,” he said.

With only a handful of episodes in the can before the strike began, shows including The Simpsons, Ugly Betty, Heroes, Desperate Housewives and the American version of The Office will all go off the air in the new year if the dispute continues.

With negotiations at a standstill, many new shows will also fail to make their debut. The first quarter of the year is “pilot season” in America, when networks commission single episodes of potential series.

Not all media executives will be sorry to see the back of pilot season. Pilots are expensive, costing $6m (£3m) or more for complex action dramas, but their success rate is hit or miss. This year a number of highly anticipated shows, including Bionic Woman, starring former EastEnder Michelle Ryan, failed to live up to expectations.

In the short term, reality TV series look set to be the winners as the TV networks rely more heavily on unscripted content to fill their schedules. If the strike continues until March, the biggest winner of all could be American Idol, the mega-hit US version of Britain’s Pop Idol.

“American Idol will probably get some of the best audiences it has ever seen. Not to mention how attractive it is going to be to advertisers who will be desperate for an event programme,” said Greenfield.

But the longer the strike continues the more of a burden will be placed on the reality TV genre and on media companies themselves. If the strike continues until the summer, it will start having an impact on film production and could hit the box office by 2009.

In the long run, the strike could be a turning point for the media industry, said Jeff Jarvis, former media exec turned internet guru and author of the Buzz-machine blog. “I think we will look back on the strike as a watershed moment in the media industry,” said Jarvis. As the audience tires of repeats and reality shows, “new talent is going to emerge online”, he said.

The already-fragmented TV audience is increasingly turning to the internet for entertainment, but a continued strike will hasten that process and threaten the waning supremacy of the big TV networks, said Jarvis. “A TV network is essentially that which finds the good stuff for you to watch. Now a network can be recommending five shows that are worth watching on the internet,” he added.

Media companies will have to get used to smaller audiences and cater to their specific tastes, Jarvis believes. He said the notion that TV provided a “grand shared national experience” was a myth. “If it existed at all then it lasted until we got the remote control and the cable box which gave us greater choice,” said Jarvis.

TV audiences for single-event shows have been in a steady decline for years as the number of channels has split up viewers,the internet and video gamehave taken up more time. Andhigh-speed broadband internconnections have grown, TV hincreasingly looked to the inteInternet programming and a share of digital rights are at the heart of the writers’ contract dispute. Some writers have dismissed as spin the idea that the strike could speed up major changes in the media landscape.

So far Wall Street has takena broadly neutral view of the strike. Greenfield is even bullish on the prospects for Viacom (the owner of reality-TV-heavy MTV) and Discovery Holding, which owns a clutch of documentary- led TV channels.

A recent report from Bear Stearns downplayed the cost of settling the strike. Even if the writers’ demands are met as currently proposed, the cost will amount to only $32.2m for Time Warner over the next three years, according to the report. It reckons NBC Universal would be hit for $23.2m over three years; News Corp for $19.5m; Walt Disney for $19.3m; Sony for $16.9m; Viacom for $16.5m; and CBS for $4.9m.

Bear Stearns even makes the case that the strike could bea good thing for the industry in the short and even medium term.

“Networks should benefit from lower programming costs as they will likely replace scripted programming with lower-cost reruns and/or reality programming,” according to the report, entitled Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Bear Stearns predicts the strike could also benefit networks by giving them the opportunity to alter fundamental parts of the TV business, including revamping the pilot process.

NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker said recently: “The strike is forcing us to look at the way we all do business and to make choices that were tough when business was as usual.”

But the longer the strike goes on the more TV and traditional media will look exposed as their audience seeks new forms of entertainment and the advertisers follow. Media pundits have been calling time on the reality TV phenomenon for some time – so far they have been wrong.

As the strike continues, the viewers' reality tolerance looks set to be tested to the limit.

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive