A tentative agreement may come as early as the end of next week - without requiring the two sides to return to formal bargaining. For the last two weeks, Writers Guild negotiators and several media moguls (Disney's Bob Iger and News Corp.'s Peter Chernin in particular) have been engaged in "informal" talks. The NYT's Michael Cieply reports this afternoon that a breakthrough occurred on Friday (Nikki Finke has reported much the same progress). From Cieply's story:

A final sticking point had been compensation for television programs that are streamed over the Internet after their initial broadcast. Companies were seeking a period during which they could stream such shows without paying a residual, and wanted to peg payments for a year of streaming at the $1,200 level established in the directors’ contract. Writers were seeking 1.2 percent of the distributors’ revenue from such streams as a residual. How that issue was finally resolved in the informal talks remained unclear as of Saturday afternoon.