During the strike, producers threatened to use the virtual orchestra to replace live music, but they never did.
The machine, called Sinfonia, was at the heart of last spring's Broadway strike; producers threatened to use it to keep shows running if musicians' walked off the job.
In the two and a half weeks of the strike, producers have lost out on millions, while stagehands — and the members of other Broadway unions, including actors, musicians, hair and makeup artists and ushers — have been getting by on strike pay, considerably less than what they would be making if they were at work.
Having barely recovered from a three-month writers strike, television producers have been rushing to get their series back on track.
Restarting a complicated story like the one on "Heroes" for just a few weeks this spring did not strike the producers or the network as wise.
At night, with the temperature at 15 below zero, the filmmakers huddled in their tents and wondered how their efforts, made with a cast of amateurs, would strike their producers in Paris.
In exchange, a deal was struck with producers' alliance Pact to open up "a minimum amount of 40%" of its programmes to tender over the next two years – potentially slicing around £160m off BBC Studios' bottom line.
His idea -- a thriller called "Speed" in which a fast-moving train has been rigged with a bomb -- may not sound very original, but it strikes his producers, stars and technical advisers as impossibly outré, and they offer suggestions to make it more palatable to the audience.
Now some of the scorned are striking back: The producers of Bette Midler's hit play "I'll Eat You Last" and Alan Cumming's mostly-one-man version of "Macbeth" are pulling back free tickets for many of the 868 Tony voters, and instead offering to sell them at standard prices of about $135 each.
The allegations against Gibson recall the incident early last year when "Top Gear" host Jeremy Clarkson struck a producer of the BBC series during a location shoot.
