From KCRW in Santa Monica, I'm Claude Brodessa Ackner, and this is The Business.

So you still want to do the show business, and you think that you got what it takes.

I mean, you really got a rap and be all at and prepare yourself for the brakes. Check it out.

This week on the business, the UPN and the WB lived but a short decade, but they changed television forever.

Now, the programming president at the WB and a veteran TV journalist have written a compelling

and cautionary tale for anyone thinking about starting a TV network.

Plus, get out your calculators.

It's the tax incentive derby.

But first, it's the Hollywood News Caravan. Stick around. It's the business from NPR.

It's been a woolly few weeks in Hollywood.

After three months of hurling epithets at one another, Hollywood studios and screenwriters are locked in a stony silence,

which is an improvement over vitriol and name-calling, I suppose.

But silence scares everyone in Hollywood.

It's the sound of quarterly profits evaporating, Malibu mortgages going unpaid, and Porsche's being repossessed. As George Bush, the elder ones put it,

Tension City. Unnerved by that tension, the studios withdrew a controversial proposal

last week that would have

messed with the venerable gravy ladled out to writers, known as residuals.

So, the gravy's off the table, but no one's talking turkey.

Yet.

That's because studios are unwilling to be forever locked into paying residuals online.

That's where everything's headed,

but no one knows how they'll make money from it. So how will digital distribution work?

...