Do people actually understand how television is funded? I’m asking this genuinely. I see people commenting online about how ridiculous it is that PVR viewings aren’t accounted for by the Nielsen ratings: first of all, they are they’re just not as highly valued as live viewings; second, the reason they’re not as highly valued is because people watching on PVRs skip commercials. I’m going to say something shockingly obvious just in case there’s someone out there who doesn’t realize it: commercials are the ENTIRE REASON networks care about how many viewers a show gets. They don’t care if you sit down to watch a show, they care that you sit down to watch a show and sit through commercials.

I think I’m one of the few people who has never been bothered by commercials, which means they will not survive as they currently exist, so another method of getting money from the audience needs to be sussed out. And unless people are willing to start paying — and we’re not talking about $0.99 an episode, it would depend on the type of show because one hour dramas and period pieces and sci-fi stuff is more expensive, but given that the biggest shows nowadays pull around 10 million passive viewers, it would probably have to cost somewhere between $5 and $20 per episode to be able to exist from viewer pre-orders — for episodes of a TV show months in advance, with nothing filmed to sell the product even, I don’t see any alternative that will really work.

Buying episodes as they are released is a possible solution, but there are a lot of problems with it. First of all, networks get a lot of the money they need to produce shows from preselling ad time — the reason networks have upfronts is to give the advertisers a sneak peek at what they have airing next year, hoping that the more impressive projects will garner higher ad rates, all of this of course using the previous year’s ratings for any given time slot as the baseline for ad rates — and if we move to a world where the only revenue is from individual episode purchases that revenue stream disappears; second, if the only revenue stream comes from episode purchases/rentals, profits from that would logically be invested into future seasons of those shows, so it’s not at all clear where the money for pilots comes from, and fans of a show would probably complain if their show that “they pay for” suffers budget cuts because nobody watched some other show, which already happens right now, but people don’t connect it as readily; there are other problems related to this, and they’re not that hard to discover if you think about it for a few minutes.

When we talk about adapting to a new online purchasing paradigm, we talk about the music industry and the books industry. Books adapted fairly readily but books have considerably smaller start up costs. I can write a novel in my spare time on a $200 computer. A TV show requires orders of magnitude more capital to put together. An album of music does have a decent investment requirement, though still not anything near what a typical show requires, and the shift to online purchases has effectively killed the album as a piece of art. Musicians still put out albums, but album sales have absolutely plummeted just as singles purchases have skyrocketed, and that’s going to be the unit of work for a musician soon enough. Bands won’t put out albums anymore, they’ll put out songs. They can make money on this I think, but it means a lot of the artistry of putting together an album of music that comes together as a piece greater than its parts will soon be an even more endangered species. This isn’t really possible with television. Some shows can operate without continuity and simply put out episodes as a unit of work, but most shows today offer up some semblance of continuity over the course of a season and throughout the series. If we try to chop up shows into smaller bits in a rush to get people to buy those bits, we will lose one of the strongest aspects of television, the one that I think makes it an incredible medium to work in.

I’m not totally pessimistic. I think we’ll figure out a way to make money off of the type of content television puts out even if the television itself doesn’t survive as is. But I think it’s going to be a rough transition, and too few people really understand the unique complications of the television industry. Put simply, you probably haven’t really thought about this enough, and it’s not as easy as you think it would be.