Digital developments come so fast that it is, in the end, understandable why so many execs can be found saying senseless things. Even if you get one part of the equation, plain old ignorance (or corporate moneyminders above) keeps folks in a rut.

(I’ve seen this phenomenon a lot in places I’ve worked. Favorite example: The news exec who intoned to an assembled staff meeting, “We’re not getting Blackberries!” He then went on to announce that the company was going to hire some consultants—at who-knows-what cost—to analyze the news division’s reporting procedures in the digital age. Six months later, the consultants report came in. Task Item No. 1: “Reporting staff needs Blackberries.”)

Anyway, with the National Association of Broadcasters meeting next week, NBC Universal’s top digital officer, George Kliavkoff, is making news with just this sort of thing. On the one hand, there are noises coming from NBC Universal that the company would be looking into making Hulu available on cellphones. It’s pretty vague as yet, but the notion is out there.

Why? Well, here’s an AP story on the effects of debuting the premiere of a new episode for free online:

CBS Corp. executives took an unusual risk last fall before its series debut of “Big Bang Theory” — it offered the entire episode online despite the chance it would sap viewership for the TV premiere.

The show, about two geeky physicists and their beautiful female neighbor, got 90,000 views on CBS.com and other Web sites over a week, followed by a better-than-expected 9.5 million for the Sept. 24 on-air premiere.

(The story as a whole is a good overview of the state of the ad industry online for the networks.)

But there are still huge logical flaws. For example, Kliavkoff told Fortune that making video available online combats privacy:

Hulu offers users “all the value of aggregation, one-stop shopping for premium content,” Kliavkoff said. At the same time, he thinks it will reduce the illegal exchange of the content on peer-to-peer networks. “The best defense [against piracy] is providing a legitimate place for people to enjoy the content,” he said. For example, if NBC can post the latest episode of “Saturday Night Live” one minute after it’s finished airing, as happens with unauthorized posting on YouTube, viewers are more likely to watch the authorized stream.

Which is fine, except that NBC still isn’t making the video available for a move to one’s iPod. That’s where the piracy roars back in. In the digital age, if data can be moved, it will, whether NBC’s top digital officer wants it to or not. So kids will just torrent the show and stick it on their iPods.

… Which brings us back to the network’s war with the iTunes store, which it left in a huff last year because Steve Jobs wasn’t letting the company making its wares—what was the word?—more “attractive”—for its consumers. (Making prices “attractive” and “flexible” in NBC-speak is synonymous in normal English with “higher.”)

Now, over at Cnet, Kliavkoff is saying that the real issue with Apple is piracy. From an onstage interview at the Ad:Tech conference in SF, Cnet quoted Kliavkoff thusly:

“If you look at studies about MP3 players, especially leading MP3 players and what portion of that content is pirated, and think about how that content gets onto that device, it has to go through a gatekeeping piece of software, which would be a convenient place to put some antipiracy measures,” Kliavkoff said in an onstage interview at the Ad:Tech conference here.

In case you didn’t get the reference, he’s talking about Apple. Maybe I’m missing something, because the tech sites aren’t making a big deal about this, but Apple does have DRM restrictions on its video. With some tweaking you can move video files (along with anything else) around on an iPod, but even that way video from the iTunes Store doesn’t play on non-authorized computers. Kliavkoff seems to be upset that one download can be moved to more than one iPod (though each one needs to already be tied to the main computer), but in real life that’s too awkward for it to be a big piracy generator.

It’s common to hear the Apple iTunes music store described as a “loss leader” for the company; that’s an image Steve Jobs has encouraged, as well. Billboard recently crunched the numbers and discovered, as you might expect, that that’s not the full story. (I can’t give you a link because the magazine’s incomprehensible web site can’t find it for me.)

Ed Christman, the Billboard’s retail columnist, figures Apple sold 1.7 billion tracks last year out of the store, which makes for about $1.9B in revenue, taking into account slightly higher prices overseas. Apple turns over 70 percent of that to the music companies, leaving $570M for the company.

Apple doesn’t break down its figures for Christman as to marketing and technical expenses; so he looks at how Amazon works and concludes the company spends about $180M a year on such things, meaning that Apple might make about $390M profit on the iTunes operation, before depreciation, amortization or taxes.

Four hundred million dollars in profit would be a lot of any company, including Apple—until last year, when its profits rocketed up (65 percent and more, in some quarters, to more than $4B for the year) and its stock price doubled.

Still, in the end it seems that the iTunes store represents about 10 percent of the company’s profit. That’s not decisive, but it’s not chump change, either. And the nature of digital sales is such that, as the stores sales grow, Apple’s profit margin will grow as well.