Thanks for that insight - I certainly recognize the phenomenon that you do a lot of stuff, and are really surprised when something gets recognized and you think 'really? you like THAT best?'

Well, on one level that sounds like a rational decision, but I think it has a lot to do with entrenched business systems. It's the same thinking that leads record companies to think they can make more money selling cd albums than mp3 downloads. Maybe, for a while, but in the long run that's a dead end. There is a whole generation of kids who scratch their heads at the idea that in the past people organized their schedule around when a tv show was 'on'. Game of Throne may make short term sense this way, but it's not a viable long-term strategy, and sooner or later iTunes or Amazon or someone is going to be there snapping at their heels, having figured out a distribution method that works.

I think there are two issues going on here - the collapse of advertising as a model for recouping costs, and the idea that niche (read quality) programming needs to be paid for by the (smaller) group of people who want to see it.

I don't disagree. This means that if we want things like Firefly, we'll have to find other ways to pay for them, because studios are not going to make them under the current model of appealing to a huge number of people who are not artsy fags.

Good point, well made.

I totally agree on the bottled water thing - I hate it, it's just an example of a company somehow managing to sell a product that people could get free, in stark contrast to HBO, refusing to sell Game of Thrones to me even though I could get it for free.

I don't know - perhaps prices will rise, perhaps we'll start taking a longer term view and producing things that will have a longer shelf life and recoup costs over a longer period of time, or perhaps we'll find a way to drive costs down, who knows? Advertising isn't going to be able to pay for interesting content in the future, I'm pretty sure of that.

I don't know that I really agree that costs would skyrocket if every production had to be paid for without ad subsidies though - I'm not sure for any given network what the balance of ads and fees are. The more that viewers pay for content though, the more that content will be produced for them rather than for advertisers, which has got to be a good thing.

To be honest, I haven't seen advertising on the internet in literally years, and I don't think I'm the only person to block ads when they browse.

I'm not sure that I would agree that only the most commercial things have ever been ad supported - I think there was a 'golden age' of ads when people watched broadcast TV and could not skip the ads, but that train has truly sailed at this point.

There was certainly enthusiasm for internet ads, and you certainly still see them, but the initial enthusiasm for that is being radically readjusted as advertisers realize just how ineffective internet ads are in the main. Partly because people interact with content differently, and partly because most content that is time-shifted (DVRed or torrented or whatever else) doesn't even have ads.

Hulu and other streaming models are an interesting phenomenon, and it will be interesting to see how that plays out, but magazines and newspapers are, for the most part, finding that online ad based models are not paying their bills - the New York Times online moved back to a subscription model after not being able to make ads work.

I think the reason that advertisers are not willing to put money behind online ads is not because the are unwilling to try it, but that they have tried it and know that it doesn't work.

Ads have a future in reality TV shows and sports broadcasts, but not in quality programming, which is going to be paid for in the future by some kind of direct payment, whether it is after the fact subscription or before the fact sponsorship through kickstarter or something else. Netflix sponsoring some original content is not quite the democratization that we all hoped for, but it's a step in that direction. Smaller funders making more niche programming and recouping their costs in more creative ways (largely ad free) is the future.

I'm not so sure - there are kickstarter projects out there that have raised over $10m, so it's not obviously impossible, nor does that method have to fund the whole thing - it's still going to get revenue by being sold to networks etc, you're simply using a subscription model to offset the fact that it can't bring in the same number of eyeballs as other things.

I understand that there are entrenched business method reasons why studios find it hard to move to more innovative funding methods, the newspaper and reporting industry is going through the same thing right now, trying to find a way to pay for what they do - it's usually only when the current way to pay for things collapses completely that organizations are able to think creatively enough to make new business models viable.

I just don't get cars at all. I mean, I don't get the premise of the universe it's set in. Is it post-apocalyptic, and all the people are dead and the cars animated? Or were there never people, and it's just a parallel universe where cars exist as sentient beings? If so, why? Do they reproduce? They date, so maybe, but, oh dear. It just doesn't work.

Ah-ha... Somehow I had missed that... Thanks for the tip!

Well, I was skeptical of BSG as an idea, but the first season of that was great. I'd give it a shot, but honestly, why? Why the need to re-boot 70s properties? Are there no original works out there any more?

Thank YOU Sir - didn't mean to dive right into controversy, but couldn't resist...

I'm not sure why you would assume that capitalism can't function in an environment not premised on scarcity - there are plenty of economic models that allow it to work. Take bottled water in the US as an example - a business that adds enough value to the customer that they are able to sell a product that people can get for free. The producer simply has to add value for the customer, and figure out a way to get paid.

During any technologically led market disruption there are always powerful economic interests whose way of making a living is going away (whale oil sellers, buggy whip manufacturers, musicians etc) who make the argument that the rest of society owes them a living because technology is taking their traditional business model away and it is hard to adapt.

Someone will figure out how to make a living in the new environment, and build a new economic model on it.

I find it astonishing that, faced with a technology that literally eliminates scarcity of goods, our response is to try to re-create artificially the scarcity that existed in order to prop up old business models that are premised on that scarcity.
I have absolutely no understanding of how anyone can think that is reasonable.