Incredibly enough the way the audience is measured with traditional TV is highly suspect. A three year old may turn the TV to a channel while the babysitter is fooling around with her boyfriend and if that home is one of the few measured with a Neilson box then it is counted as hundreds of thousands of viewers. The sponsors are almost as foolish as the Networks to count on these stats. If a show is downloaded it is C H O S E N to watch and although it cannot count noses as far as number of people in the household it is much more accurate. Jeez the advantages to networks and advertisers is obvious.

If it’s a program that is paid for, it doesn’t even matter if the program is indeed even watched at all!

[quote author=“sleepygeek”]But the ad revenues from the broadcast for one viewing are negligible compared to the revenue for the same viewing from iTunes.

I don’t know what the numbers are (and I can’t take your word for it), and I never said it made sense.  Just saying what their mentality is.

Also, you have to take into account how many viewers there are vs. downloaders.  There is no guarantee that every viewer would start downloading if the shows were no longer broadcast.  Also, don’t they get the money from the advertisers before the show is aired, but from iTunes after the show is purchased?

Don’t get me wrong, I hate it too.  It’s a PITA that there are sometimes 3 or 4 shows on at the same time that I want to watch, and shows I have to miss because I can’t get home from work in time.

Interesting question. What is the downside to the studio if, hypothetically, the entire audience moved to iTunes?  Assuming the revenue increase could be captured by the studios at least in the short term.

Well, it is a totally different business model, no?  So maybe the ad sales department gets made redundant.  Aren’t ad sales basically the core of a network?  And maybe the producers suddenly don’t even need the networks, so harder to get shows for your “network”.  And would you still even need to broadcast if that audience becomes negligible?  So, maybe that whole broadcasting overhead becomes a drag and must be sold off.  And what role would the networks even play if iTunes and other technical partners handle the distribution?  Marketing of DVD sales?  How does a network build an audience for one of their shows on iTunes?  Currently they have a pretty effective, if increasingly less so, lock on the 8 PM primetime habit of the viewing public. Sure that is going away, but how do you get an audience without it?  Would iTunes front screen placement be the way to build an audience?

I just get the feeling that if the entire audience went to iTunes the networks are effectively dead.  In the short term they capture the revenue from iTunes sales, but those contracts will expire and, IMHO, they will lose the ability to capture those revenues over time.  They would become production houses.  But the biggest loss is they would lose the ability to create hit shows via their TV schedules and the market power that comes with that ability, and I don’t see what market power they are left with, other than financing production.

Just some questions in my head that I’m throwing out there.  Probably just proving my ignorance of the networks business model.