Who cares how it looks. Does the built in browser rule or is it the same old piece of crap that can't even do basic CSS?

1) Consumers haven't paid for journalism for decades. We pay for cable and magazine subscriptions, but media companies make their money from ads. Craigslist and Tivo killed traditional media.

2) Dominic @6 is right. Old media thinks the internet is just TV with a keyboard so they do the same old interrupt driven untargeted mass market advertising. It turns out the internet is terrible at interrupting but great at displaying *relevant* ads at the exact moment that a user is searching for the advertised product. TV networks don't get this.

3) Old media is terrible at knowing who is looking at what, let alone who is paying attention. On the internet you can know *everything* about your users. You can follow their clicks, their attention, where they scrub through video, their neighborhood, what kind of computer they have, EVERYTHING. Too bad TV networks don't get this.

4) I've never seen ABC.com and the rest put an RSS, Email, or text message subscribe/alert button on their video pages. Instead they want us all to *remember* show schedules, come back, and sit through ads. They're blowing a huge chance to have a relationship with the audience. The sad truth is that TV networks don't want a relationship. They want us all to sit around the glowing box together on *their* schedule as if it were 1966.

5) The smartest, richest, most desirable demographic groups do not tolerate mass market ads, and they don't watch live TV.

Mark's post is about the downside, but there are huge upsides for doing entertainment and advertising right. But it won't be old media companies that do it for the same reasons that no railroad companies became airlines.

I've been writing about the End of TV on my own blog starting here: http://nathanbowers.com/business/the-death-of-television-part-1-in-a-series/

Seth Godin has a lot to say about the future of marketing in his blog and books. If you don't know his work, watch this video of him giving a talk at Google: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294

A variation on this is: "Nobody ever got fired for 'X'." One of my technology directors was leading one of those yearly "this is what we are up to" meetings and started talking about our challenges with the cost, licensing, and interoperability of our "big software". So during Q&A I asked if we were looking at using any free open source alternatives where it could make sense. With a straight face my director said "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." You know, nobody ever got ahead by doing exactly what their competitors do either.