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Why aren't television shows financed, produced and sold like software? We have the technology (several of them, in fact) we need to distribute them online, over cable or satellite or on DVD, so why do we still use cable and satellite like they're classical broadcast mediums?

The success of TV on DVD should be proof enough that there's money to be made distributing shows outside of the classic broadcast, yes? Yet, it hasn't really happened. Comcast is making an expedition into Video On Demand, but still their strategy so far is to give you a library of crap they can give you for free, instead of the series people actually want. Yes, they do have some newer things and you do pay for them Pay Per View style, but as it stands right now, the whole thing just trivializes the potential of the technology. Why can't I buy Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, the whole lot, and have it downloaded onto my DVR to view at my leisure?

To be fair I doubt the folks at Comcast are the problem. I suspect that the business has not caught up with the technology, or the changing viewing habits of the audience. The broadcast schedule and the financing model that has grown up around it are too deeply ingrained into every aspect of making this stuff, I think. Still, I think they'll come around, eventually.

It occurs to me that in the last few years the television industry has had to deal with a massive upswing in piracy, due to the ease of digital transfer. The industry's take on this has been to lobby to legislate mandatory anti-piracy hardware and broadcast protocols and to crack down on large pirate operations whenever possible. This is a marginally better approach than the music industry took, but ultimately just as flawed. None of this would actually stop piracy; at best, it slows the process - but not the result. So, as I was considering this I thought about software piracy. We game developers have been the victims of piracy on a scale akin to the piracy of the Barbary coast in the 17th and 18th century... Yet, despite this, the entertainment software industry grows and grows every year. I point this out because, while we sue and lobby as well, we're not half as litigious as the other components of the world-wide entertainment industry -- but we seem to succeed just as effectively.

I think part of this is that we do our best not to appear adversarial to our consumers. Sure, sometimes we're not very good at it - such as Sony and their first few PSP firmware updates - but we do our best. Still, we respond back to consumers as quickly and effectively as we can -- and most importantly, we focus on bringing them what we want (usually - there are exceptions everywhere). It seems to me that television isn't focused on the consumer; it's focused on the advertiser. Because we ship our products directly to a retail market, where consumers pay to play them at all, we're much more dependant on the consumers' reactions to our products.

Television gets a large chunk of its money from advertisers, seeing advertising income long before the product makes it to DVD to realize direct sales. In a way, this is akin to distributors in our world of video games, but only vaguely, since our distributors still make their money by selling to the retailers. The advertisers are the ones concerned with broadcasts and viewership - if the show is watched by a lot of people, the advertisements are exposed to a larger audience and the more effective the ads are in realizing sales.

Now consider, what if the shows weren't produced for broadcast first, but instead were created first for retail release, with the show's broadcast acting like a giant ad for the DVD or Video On Demand (VOD) release (but still had its commercials has it does today)? This makes the role of the advertiser less important, but still allows for advertisement income. I wonder if more, or less, shows would be made. The focus on the retail release as the profit generator means that the shows would then live or die by how the viewers themselves liked the show (not the time slot, the channel, number of ads between acts, etc.). In theory, at least, it would open the door for niche series like Firefly to flourish instead of being canceled. Or would it?

One of the benefits of broadcast TV, after all, is that there's a chance you might flip through to something you've never seen and give it a shot. How often do you that at the software store? Of course, the concepts in broadcast TV will never die anyway - we need them to profit of live events like sports if nothing else.

Admittedly, I'm pretty ignorant of how the TV industry works, so my perspective is only that of a viewer. It's probably way more complicated than that. Still, it seems like we'd have better small screen entertainment if we allowed more variety and wouldn't putting the shows out into the retail channel, first, allow for at least a little more variety? It seems to work that way in video gaming, where we've always been a consumer-dependant enterprise. Even now in the middle of the so called "creativity crisis," we still have room for niche titles like X3, quirky innovative takes on games like Indigo Prophecy and "hardcore" gaming experiences found in MMOs like Everquest 2 or World of Warcraft.

- Snipehunter