So, three months into this U.S. writers strike and quel mess! Nielsen Online recently reported that traffic to a number of online video (OV) sites has doubled since the strike began. Anyone who imagined that digging in their heels would somehow protect the television industry from the online invasion sure got that wrong.

In case the correlation isn’t clear, the OV uptick, as (triumphantly) reported on TechCrunch, is headlined ‘Thanks Striking Writers, Online Video Going Up, Up, Up, Up.’ Then come the comments, the tone of which should further rattle anyone whose mortgage is bankrolled by the small screen. ‘Does anyone even watch TV anymore?’ marvelled one keyboardista.

Strike or no, this worlds-on-a-collision-course drama has been playing out for some time now. But what to do? Hmm…

‘I spend quite a bit of time in America, and what I hear constantly from start-ups is, ‘We’ve got to do this now. It’s a race, and we’ve got to be there first,” says Will Pate, an online marketing specialist and coproducer/cohost of CommandN, a weekly online tech news program. ‘In Canada, we take a wait-and-see attitude, drag our heels, see how it plays out.’

So while NBC and Fox have Hulu and CBS has a major stake in Joost, hey, here in Canada the broadcasters all have websites. And broadband. Many have some content available, though preferably as a teaser sending viewers back to the mothership, the better to monetize you with.

Certainly rights throw up a barrier, but there are attitude issues as well.

‘There’s no shortage of web talent or people who can produce, but we do have a shortage of domain expertise in the web in media companies,’ says Pate. ‘They own ISPs and TV companies, but the folks running these companies don’t seem to be ahead enough of the curve to catch these opportunities.’

CTV’s Comedy Network, which tries out new talent with original online programming, may be something of an exception. And then there’s Rogers-owned Citytv, with its Webnation podcast, winner of iTunes’ Top New Podcast Award, which…

Oh.

…Citytv just cancelled. Happy new year to Webnation host and creator Amber MacArthur (also a CommandN coproducer/cohost), who recently blog-blabbed, ‘Last week Rogers decided they no longer want to do the show…just imagine a bad TV newsroom drama set in Toronto.’ If anyone should know better, it is she. But MacArthur, who has dyed her blonde hair back to its natural brown, is doing some work for Tony Robbins and shopping her show around. She is moving on, and, clearly, that girl will land on her feet.

The same cannot necessarily be said for broadcasters like Rogers, which can’t seem to shake that top-down attitude to content. It’s gonna cost them, says Pate.

‘There’s an arc of building audiences, and it doesn’t just happen overnight. I don’t think [Canadian broadcasters] realize how much they are in competition with YouTube,’ he says.

‘Content is not king; context is king,’ says Mark Greenspan, director of digital media at Achilles Media, the media-event organizer that produces confabs including the Banff World Television Festival, nextMEDIA, and the upcoming NATPE Mobile (Jan. 28).

Greenspan says the catch-phrase means ‘finding synergies between the use of the medium and the content itself.’

At least since the time two years ago that toilet-flushing cats started doing their business on MySpace, professional TV content and amateur cyber content have been racing for that sweet spot.

User-generated content has been getting slicker, with a burgeoning tide of prod-users emerging on social networking sites and on their own merchandise-, ad- and sponsorship-supported sites, often modeled after TV channels. To wit, in Canada we have Jason Agnew and Matt Chin’s Interactive Emmy Award-winning BiteTV, the motto of which is ‘Where A.D.D. is A.O.K.’

Meanwhile, cutting-edge television producers – many of whom are themselves products of the digital age – have also been experimenting with the web as something more than a threat or a marketing tool by ‘reverse engineering’ content – that is, producing for online and then migrating the material to traditional TV, instead of vice versa.

Former Disney topper Michael Eisner invested heavily in the 80 x 90-second online slasher drama Prom Queen, which, he recently acknowledged in Variety, has fallen short of being the Internet video sensation he’d like. ‘We’re still in the experimental stage,’ he says.

Here in Canada, meanwhile, we’ve got the 8 x 15 online sci-fi series Sanctuary, created by Damian Kindler, previously of Stargate SG-1. (Its $4.5-million price tag made the Guinness Book of World Records as ‘highest budget for a direct-to-web broadcast’ – hope that doesn’t turn out to be a Waterworld-style achievement.) Canadian export Michael Cera has his brilliant CBS.com-backed Clark and Michael (produced with Clark Duke), and Tom Green has taken his modest self-produced online talk show (set in his living room) to syndicated television in the U.S. and to The Comedy Network in Canada.

Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, the duo behind thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, get to thumb their noses at network television with Quarterlife. The series, kind of a cross between, oh, thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, was originally turned down by ABC. The duo then produced it out of their own pockets for the web.

One writers strike later and NBC has announced that it will air the series (shot with SAG labor), re-cut into six hour-long eps, in the spring. It’s a second-window purchase, after MySpace and Quarterlife.com. are done with it. While Herskovitz and Zwick maintain that they’re still in the hole on this project, they do hang on to editorial control and ownership, something few producers working with a studio can boast.

At this point, a television slot remains the validation that many web producers crave, but that may not be the case for long.

‘We’re still waiting for that show that’s going to start online to become a huge hit [on television],’ says Pate. ‘The window may be closing for those, because people may be moving their attention away from the TV and to the Internet. And the writers strike is only accelerating that.’