Decline of Networks Continues
Television networks continue to lose viewers. Gaming, YouTube, BitTorrent and others provide viewers with alternatives. Advertisers are looking for other outlets. The television writers are striking for their fair share of new media (pencils down!). Networks seem to think they can set it right by breaking the writers union, but how is that going to recover the audience that is already gone? Networks think that if they simply embed the advertising into the content and distribute it freely on Hulu et al, then everything should work fine. Personally I don’t look forward to a solution that turns all media into AM radio with an ad in between every song and makes movies into the ones on network TV. If that is the price I have to pay to keep the music industry and movies afloat, then they can just go out of business. I am willing to pay for content without ads and so are many others.
I’d be very surprised if that is how things end up.