John Rogers expands from his recent post to elbaborate thusly (from which I’m just gonna pull the highlights, but the whole things really work a read):

4GM: Nobody gets Rich, Everybody Gets Paid

…

Whedon’s Angel very much died because the WB realized they were just advertising for 20th Century Fox’s box sets.

…

DVD sales are the financial engine of Hollywood now, but there are problems here, too. First, how do you sell a show without network exposure first? Second, what happens when a show is the type to encourage dedicated fans who will buy the boxed set but isn’t widely appealing enough to generate ratings and hence stay on the network schedule?

All this to get back to my point — this Xbox play may not be the end-point transformative moment. But it’s monumental, perhaps even more so than when Apple started selling videos — no, wait, I take that back, because getting people into the habit of paying per show/movie was a crucial bit of mental conditioning. Ahem. Where was — oh, yes. I’m one of those people who strongly believes viewers link to an “entertainment space” in their lives. People are already in the habit of having video games in their entertainment space. They’re in the habit of having cable boxes in their entertainment space. They are not in the habit, yet, of setting up wireless routers to stream product into their entertainment space.
…

Rough pencil sketch of the future. The major generic networks fade as old people who just want something on in the background die off. Branding restructures along two paths, with a.) occurring before b.), but then running parallel.

a.) networks become even more genre or style defined. SciFi, Sleuth … even now, look at USA with its genial detectives, or FX with its gritty dramas. Some of the networks remain, but specifically as distribution arms, and not particularly effective ones.

…

b.) new sources of information assessment will emerge. This is right out of my ass, but as new communities form, prevalent media personalities of today and the near future will become more important as “guides” for that community.

Let’s take Warren Ellis, for example. Assume Warren’s dark heart improbably beats on, allowing him decades to build his awful ideological army. There will come a day when Warren will say “behold, people, this thing is good, and not at all testicle or piercing oriented. If you pay a dollar for a download of it, you will not be disappointed.” Granted, the profit margins will be small, but that’s the direction we’re heading in anyway. The massive scores off network hits were inflated, a brief, beautiful Golden Age of Filthy Money which I doubt will naturally recur. In the future, nobody gets rich, but everybody gets paid.

Yes, I basically just said that Oprah is a neo-network. Go ahead, argue with me. Is Dick Wolf a network? JJ Abrams? Is Kiefer Sutherland? Who do you trust to entertain you?

Take this one step further. Several humans of like intellect or taste — Warren, say Joss Whedon, maybe Charlie Stross, toss Cory Doctorow in there — they might cut deals with producers. (Are Tarantino and Rodriguez now a “network”? Hell, how are they not?) New “networks” — which will rarely, ever again be separate from linked production entities — new networks will evolve in the free market. The natural aggregation points will be branded creative entities, individual creators or otherwise, who engender personal loyalty. We may well see “schools” of like-minded entertainers evolving in television, the way we had in art, or even in film in the 60’s and 70’s. Different (and probably unpredictable) models will evolve, but those will be the seeds.

There’ll be no more consensus media, which some people even now mourn. But again — the last fifty years were a unique moment in history. What we’re looking at now is a correction. It’s famously said said that one in ten Britons who could read, read Dickens when he was alive.

The most popular writer in the history of the English language … had a ten share.