Comment Re:Educational TV (Score 1) 205
Market economy? Yes, indeed. Now that millions of folks like me use tech like TiVo to skip the ads, ad revenues are dropping, they need to reach wider (and less tech savvy) audiences to compensate, and presto: we have what they warned we would have. So we move on to more intelligent programming, meaning "what are the smart podcasts on the Internet?", TV viewership drops, Internet use booms, ad revenues on the Internet boom, Google booms, we all get ad blockers for our browsers and complain that our favorite websites are getting dumber (because I deserve high-quality, smart programming for free!), rinse and repeat....
We keep evolving ad resistance, starving ad-sponsored programming, and the environment keeps trying to evolve better ads.
Fortunately, there's vastly more room in the state space on the Internet than the hundred or so slots on TV, and much lower cost of entry, so we'll probably get a lot of good stuff, but we can't count on its stability. We're still pretty early in the process of evolving business models in this environment.