Here’s what I tell them. Friends, you run a television network. Now let’s think about this. What the fuck is a television network? It’s a system of affiliates designed to help carry a broadcast signal across the wide continent of America on airwaves and into television sets owned by millions of people. In essence, you are in the distribution business. In the second half of the twentieth century you had the great good fortune to be granted a kind of limited monopoly over the distribution of a very valuable commodity. There were only so many airwaves, hence only so many networks. There were way more advertisers than there were channels to carry their advertising. So you sat there with your choke-hold on the garden hose, controlling the flow of programming and getting fatter and fatter and fatter.

It was a wonderful system. For you anyway. Except that it had one huge flaw. Which is that for you guys, the middlemen, to get rich, you needed to fuck over the people at both ends of the value chain — the consumers who had no choice in what they watched and spent years being fed mountains of dog shit, and the producers of content who were at your mercy and had to negotiate with this tiny number of networks who operated, let’s be honest here, as a kind of cartel.

It’s over now. Your business model was a historical anomaly built on scarcity of a valuable resource and the willingness of a small group of network operators to not slit each other’s throats and to collaborate in exploiting the content producers. Sort of like the Five Families in New York. Wars are bad for business.

Rest of it here: http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/09/boring-rant.html

Fail.

Until Hulu figures out how to get their content to the television its not going to be a money maker for the owners..

Old media doesn’t seem to have learned anything from TiVo or the mass piracy that’s going on. Good content isn’t enough – it needs to be reliable – available when and where consumers want it.