For many television viewers, the ongoing writers’ strike that has sent scribes to the streets of both New York and Los Angeles for a week straight will set in slowly. Sure, David Letterman and Jon Stewart have been stuck on repeat for a week now, but it’ll be for another week or two before shows such as NBC’s “The Office” run out of new material, and it will be months before shows such as Fox’s “24” miss their targeted returns to the airwaves.

But while the average viewer will adjust slowly to a menu of reality shows and reruns, the shockwaves rippling through the streets of New York — within both the television networks and movie studios — have been swift and severe. On one side of the writers’ spectrum are people such as Chris Albers, the former president of the Writers Guild of America, East, and one of the writers for “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” who has already paid his dues and proven himself on a hit network series.

“I’m one of those lucky people out here, who has had a pretty decent run and worked fairly steadily for the last decade,” Mr. Albers said late last week. “Right now, I’m just losing my paycheck from ‘Conan O’Brien,’ but there are others out here who are risking, and losing, a lot more by this strike. It’s just that important.” Bonnie Datt is one such writer, an up-and-comer who has already taken a financial hit from the current situation. When word from the writers’ union came down last week, Ms. Datt and her writing partner, Jim Colucci, were meeting with television executives to pitch ideas for new shows. Ideally, they’d get the green light on a pilot that would start filming this winter and then earn a slot in the fall 2008 schedule.

But as news of the strike — the result of a standoff between writers and producers over digital rights — filtered down, and networks began altering their plans through the end of 2008, studio interest in Ms. Datt’s ideas evaporated before her eyes. In a strike-while-the-iron-is-hot business, every iron has gone cold.

“It’s sort of like lockdown at this point,” she said. “I’m sure all of this is dead now. It’s affecting all of us — and some a lot worse than me. There are some major show runners who are losing money because nothing is being considered for next season, some people whose shows may never come back on the air because they are first-year shows without a strong following.”

Just as audiences have yet to grasp the havoc this strike could wreak on their nightly TV viewing or, if enough time goes by, on their weekly trips to the movie theater, the leadership at the writers’ guild has yet to fully understand how wide the strike’s tactical timing — poised to not just disrupt one television season, but next season’s development cycle as well — may disrupt or even destroy the careers of some 12,000 members.

In the case of Ms. Datt and Mr. Colucci, it has taken years of writing shows and tweaking scripts to arrive at this point, where networks will consider their pilot pitches (“We definitely thought we were on the verge of closing a deal,” Ms. Datt said). But as the industry grinds to a halt, and this year’s shows back up into next year’s schedule and open ears quickly become closed doors, Ms. Datt said she knows all too well the risks she and her colleagues face.

“The talk on the picket line is essentially: ‘After they take this, what’s next?'” Ms. Datt said. “It’s really pretty simple. The networks and the producers are trying to decimate the guild, to rewrite the rules as things shift from TV to the Internet. It’s like telling musicians today, ‘You’re not going to get paid for downloads.’ You’d have a lot of broke musicians. It’s really the same thing for TV writers.”

The key issue at play in the strike is the way royalties will be divided in the future, as traditional programming is increasingly distributed through Web sites, downloads, and other new media formats. Today, when a television show is aired later as a rerun, or sold to consumers via VHS or DVD, the writers get a cut of the earnings. But as programs begin to shift to online premieres and reruns, and as the television of the typical household is swapped out for a computer monitor, no one knows for sure how the digital revenue will be divided.

Many writers who have walked out on their jobs see it as an urgent issue of the present. This is not simply the negotiating of an imaginary future, where the television industry will merge with the online world, but a reality of the here and now.

“[Producers] say on the one hand that they are not making any money on the Internet,” Ms. Datt said, “but then you watch an episode of ‘The Office’ on TV and then watch the same show on the Internet, and they are running different ads. And then you see what they’re telling their shareholders, and you read how they’re bragging about how much money they are making online. Which way is it?”

There is another segment of writers and nonwriters, however, that sees the strike as the opening chapter of a larger, industry-wide fight over new-media revenue. As the Writers Guild membership has banded together in near-unanimity, and as they have been joined in solidarity by members of other creative unions, all indicators point to a strike that will last a lot longer, and devolve into something far more heated, than anything that has been seen in decades.

“Everyone is affected by new technology and downloads, as people start to watch more shows online and through TiVo. And the other unions realize that whatever happens here will likely be repeated down the road with their contracts,” Mr. Albers said. “This is the precedent.”

ssnyder@nysun.com