TV executives are just as clueless about our technological future as newspaper executives. That's the only way I can explain the panicked choice to pull episodes of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" from hulu. I appreciate that these corporations exist to make money. And that it could seem like people watching shows online means you're losing money. There's not a perfect solution, and TV and journalism are going to get much worse before someone is clever enough to come up with a way to make it better.
But it turns out that people who download "free" (stolen) music online are more likely to buy music than people that don't listen to as much. Sure, if you're a cable TV channel, your ideal is lots of people watching your show on TV, paying for having the channel and seeing ads which give you piles of cash. But if that's not happening for whatever reason, selling ads online for people to watch the show there does create real money. And the percentage of people who are going to go buy the DVD if they can't watch it easily online? Wee.
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