The Los Angeles Times reported this morning that several groups of striking writers are meeting with venture capitalists about funding the production of straight-to-the-web programming — independently of Hollywood studios and at odds with the union — a move not unlike the way United Artists (now part of MGM) was founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith who also felt the need to break away from the studio system.

Silicon Valley investors historically have been averse to backing entertainment start-ups, believing that such efforts were less likely to generate huge paydays than technology companies. But they began considering a broader range of entertainment investments after observing the enormous sums paid for popular Web video companies, including the $1.65 billion that Google Inc. plunked down last year for YouTube, a site where users post their own clips.

They also have been emboldened by major advertisers, which prefer supporting professionally created Web entertainment to backing user-generated content on sites such as MySpace that can be in poor taste.

“I’m 100% confident that you will see some companies get formed,” said Todd Dagres, a Boston-based venture capitalist who has been flying to L.A. and meeting with top writers for weeks. “People have made up their minds” (story continues here).

To the studio bosses — even the writers themselves — this has to have been an unexpected consequence of the two-month-old strike. Honestly, though, it’s something I’ve been expecting ever since I “discovered” Mosaic and thought I saw the future.

Fact is, like a lot of people working on the Internet I came up in the old media business of film, TV and multimedia, beginning as cameraman and editor, then director, then producer, raising in the food chain in search of greater certainty and control of my work. About the time I came to the conclusion I would forever be at the mercy of studios, distributors or networks, the web came along and looked like a direct path to my audience, so I jumped on board at the first chance.

Though a proper mash-up of video and Web technology took longer than I thought it would, and the scope of my work has expanded considerably during that time, the explosion of web video during the past 12 months — Google & YouTube hooking up, Joost launching its P2P service, a profusion of stock media sites, now the writers getting restless — suggests we may finally be seeing the day when creatives and audiences can be directly connected.

So was the move to cut the studios out of the food chain predictable? I’m not going to say “I told you so” though I do believe it’s timely, in harmony with the relentless  democratization of media technology and disaggregation of content that I’ve experienced during my career. And it’s surely not the last we’ll see of the edges forcing inefficiencies and bloat out of the middle.

Speaking of bloat in the middle, it’s nearly Christmas and I have a week of dinners ahead of me. See you at the gym!