From Cnet:

ABC found that rather than cannibalizing TV viewership, giving away the shows online instead enhances it.  

The article is about how the network has seen the light about making its shows available almost anywhere—complete with commercials.*  The revelation in that sentence is something digital advocates have always contended, that new technologies always end up turbocharging the media industries. (Besides the fact that it’s pointless, these days, not to make the stuff available digitally because it de facto already is.)

As I think this through it occurs to me that TV is a special case in the digital realm. We’re used to seeing the stuff with commercials, and people will presumably accept relatively benign interruptions, particularly if the material is easy to manipulate. (Though I personally am finding the unnecessarily proprietary ABC player difficult to set up**.) Music is a lot different, because listeners will not tolerate ads, and the medium is consumed in a much different way. (Experienced hundreds of times, in some cases, rather than an average of once or twice.) Beyond that, the horse is long out of the barn.

For TV, however, there are not yet the ubiquitous players for the medium that made unauthorized music distribution so irresistible. Right now, amidst the ineluctable decaying of CD sales, it’s hard to imagine it, but it certainly seems that if all the networks followed ABC’s lead, and managed to make the players easy, and allowed embedding, and permitted distribution on the social network services, before illegal downloading becomes the norm, the medium could weather the digital conversion relatively unscathed, right?

The only question is whether it can make the economics work—i.e., will the per-viewer rates they derive from online viewing match the big sums they’ve been getting from broadcast. In this context, the money quote above in the end maybe still represent the networks’ whistling past the graveyard. Over time, broadcast viewership will continue an overall decline, and online, as viewing there becomes the norm, the broadcast shows will inevitably face more competition. Besides the lack of control of distribution the media companies are exasperated with, they still have to contend with the way the internet can arbitraily create cultural phenomena—without big marketing budgets.

* Also from the article:

ABC intends to give viewers control of their viewing experience on any platform, Cheng said. The network is already showing its shows on everything from Facebook to AOL and Veoh, and plans soon to launch a new video player on its own site. This month ABC launched its “Open ABC” initiative, giving access to developers who will “innovate and give access to our shows (in ways) we haven’t even thought of yet,” such as new forms of 3D visual search and other applications for blogs, fan sites, and social networks.

“ABC isn’t just a television brand,” he said. “It’s a content brand living on any device, and tailored specifically to the consumer and advertiser needs, and optimized for each specific use case and digital platform.”

And:

Cheng said the network had been the first on iTunes, the first to stream entire shows online, the first to stream in a “720p” format in HD, had the most views of its shows of any network online and continues to lead in attracting unique users, in pageviews and time spent per user, compared to other networks’ sites. 

** Once I did, I saw some of the Jimmy Kimmel show—an episode that began with a advertising skit, complete with a racist Hispanic character, right out of The Larry Sanders Show. That’s not a good thing. The product was an online computer backup service, the digital equivalent, I’m sure, of the Garden Weasel.