One example is a new deal with the Liberty Mutual Group insurance company that is centered on a pair of two-hour TV movies to be broadcast under the banner of the company — “Liberty Mutual Presents,” for example.

The movie plots are intended to complement a campaign for Liberty Mutual that was introduced in 2006 by Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos in Boston, which carries the theme, “Responsibility. What’s your policy?” The scripts, which Liberty Mutual will help develop, will discuss subjects like taking responsibility for one’s actions and deciding how to do the right thing.

TV sales were expected to slow this year after a couple of big years tied to technology improvements and following the usual surge around the holidays, but some industry watchers suspect sales have slowed even more than anticipated.

Twentieth Television has entered a deal with Internet mega-site Yahoo! to develop a series featuring popular Web videos for syndication that could air next year.

According to sources close to the situation, the potential series, which is in active development by the distributor, would be a fast-paced program featuring the hottest videos from around the Web. Should the project move out of the development stage, it would be offered as a Monday-through-Friday show to stations and launch next fall.

When are TV people going to learn that no one online is going to watch a TV-style “clipshow” of popular web videos? Those who hang out online have already seen them. As for syndicating the same content to be broadcast on television, TV-watchers don’t like watching a bunch of low-res, compressed web videos interrupted by 30-second advertisements.

No one likes clipshows. This isn’t “content creation,” its just exploiting the amateur public videos that don’t require any union staff.

Think of this as “reality tv” for the ‘net from the ‘net.

The big concern for advertisers is that the broadcast networks - ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and the CW - will lose even more of their already-shrinking audience.

“If ratings fall by 15, 20 or even 30 percent because we’re getting reruns or shows less appealing to viewers, that’s a big problem,” said one ad buyer. “There are advertisers who are depending on a certain level of ratings points a week.”

The networks are having a hard enough time delivering the viewers they promised advertisers.

They are still doling out millions in so-called “make-goods” - additional ad spots - to compensate advertisers for last year’s ratings shortfall.

Moreover, viewership is down for a lot of returning shows this season, and most new shows have debuted to lackluster ratings and little buzz. 

As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, the FCC is attempting to eliminate the last bastion of media ownership rules.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Conventional wisdom these days has it that television is dying. Like most conventional wisdom, it’s dead wrong.

By almost any measure, television is alive and well. The number of TV households keeps growing - particularly among Latino, African American and Asian Pacific American audiences. Household viewing remains near an all-time high of more than eight hours a day. And television consumption continues to eclipse any other medium by a wide margin; with 90 percent of it still done at home where, on average, there now are more TV sets than people to watch them.

This opening salvo, quoting the enormity of TV watching as part of America’s media landscape, is a typical tactic for those who are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

What they fail to realize is that we are now at the peak of TV. If Americans are already watching eight (!) hours a day, can anyone realistically believe that it will go up to nine hours a day? People are completely maxed out on TV. There is nowhere to go but down.

Microsoft Corp. and its hardware partners are trying to bridge the divide between home computers and TV sets this holiday season with the release of several “media extenders.” These TV set-top boxes will connect wirelessly to computers running the Home Premium or Ultimate flavors of Windows Vista and enable users to use their TV sets to watch movies, TV shows and Internet video that is stored on their computers.

The problem with “convergence” technologies is that while more of our media are becoming trapped on our computers, do people like grandma really want to spend the time to hook up the finicky things to their TV set? Perhaps one day when computers are as reliable as VCRs (Tivo anyone?) they will. But in an age when you can hook your iPod or even iPhone up to the TV to watch video, why spend so much effort trying to hook up a Windows computer?

Dedicated hardware always wins in the end (even if that dedicated hardware is just a software computer in disguise). 

“This is another sign that the Internet is maturing into a productive distribution channel for professionally produced content,” said Doug Allen, the union’s national executive director.

There is no surer sign in the death-of-TV than the fact that unions will cease to allow pay/benefit distinctions that give favorable (i.e. cheaper) rates to web content. Makes one wonder what the looming Hollywood strikes are really all about, doesn’t it?

Some highly anticipated Web sites are being modeled on making the experience of watching video online more like watching television. These sites rely on software that enlarges the interface so that it fills your computer screen X from edge to edge.

[...snip...]

“The early stages of video content on the Internet was a lot of user-generated stuff, stuff like my grandmother and her cat,” said Joost chief executive officer Mike Volpi. “What we’re trying to do is evolve that experience into something that the viewer doesn’t view just out of interest, but actually builds an affinity with that particular programming content.”

[...snip...]

The Internet and television are increasingly being portrayed as on a collision course, the two destined to fuse within 10-20 years when TV could become just another form of high-speed data. But those visions remain relatively far in the future. Online video is still in its infancy, Shapiro said.

What revelations!

1. People prefer high-resolution, high quality video rather than tiny, blurry, postage stamp sized videos.

2. People prefer big-budget, high-production-value content rather than home videos.

3. Computers are just as capable of playing video in a TV-like fashion.

Sounds like they took a time machine into the future! What fucking year is it again? Where are our rocketpacks?