Great reply. You are definitely correct. I was making my observations very much from a consumer standpoint, not so much from the network’s side of things.

I do think it will happen…eventually. A combination of ads the way hulu does them with a monthly subscription would recoup some portion of the ad dollars they get now.

As you said, networks might be slow to adjust, but hulu is at least evidence that Fox/NBC understand that consumers want their tv this way and they’d rather control it than have some young upstart come along.

And honestly, I don’t even care that much about the tv box. It takes two seconds to hook up the s-video output on my laptop to my TV….and you can already buy HD TVs/Monitors that’ll do both for you. The line is becoming blurred, and in the next 10 years it’ll probably become even more blurred.

It’s a tricky area of canabalisation. The Networks know how to make money from traditional TV. They don’t know how to do it online. In General, a lot of ‘media companies’ have been burned trying to get ‘online media’ profitable.

Now internet tv is making a lot of noise. People say things like ‘of course internet tv will take over eventually.’ They are not sure how though. Set top box’s? Purpose built tv ‘PCs’?

Anyway it could (they hope) take another 10+ years. When it hits it could kill the old networks with ad dollars drying up.

TV production was built on mass branding & mass products. True ‘on demand’ will encourage niche interests. It could mean breaking every 20m per episode show into 100 200k shows or 1000 20k shows & trying to replace every $250m ad contract with 10,000 $25,000 clients.

This may be coming anyway. But I would be surprised to see Big Networks take the lead on it.

This kind of business is just not on their resume. So I think that the prudent networks will tread lightly. Expirementing & keeping options open.

That may well mean that some little upstart takes the cheese. But C’est la vie.

The railroads never did start airlines.