Note: I am a fiction junkie. I prefer books, but I can appreciate the visual arts of cinema, television and graphic novels as well. It's not the news, it's not reality programming, it's not educational programming that make television even remotely interesting to me -- it's strong story-telling done well, that gets me interested and keeps me coming back.The rest of what TV uses to pay the bills... if it goes into a blackhole tomorrow, I won't mind at all.

I stopped having TV in 1992 when I went to college. I couldn't afford to buy one to take with me, and my rooms didn't have one, and we couldn't have afforded the cable bill anyway... and I was never much of a TV kid anyway. And I never picked that habit back up. Now I live in a dead zone where nothing broadcast shows up on our DVD-monitor (aka TV) without the assistance of Cable or Satellite. No big loss.

But over the years, I've heard enough word of mouth (and seen enough good reviews here) that certain programs (Buffy et al, Rome, Dr. Who) have been intriguing enough to catch my attention and I've Netflix'ed them. All the pleasure of good stories, none of the advertising, no strangers tromping all over my house, making messes by drilling through my walls and being insultingly baffled about how we survive without Playstations, Windows XP and the world created by Arbitron and Neilson.

I'm one of those people who would gladly pay $30 a month for a la carte cable for BBC America, HBO and SciFi... and nothing else. I would pay premium prices to not have to put up with nonsense and detritus. But since they force me to take the consumer peddling and Missing Blonde Girl networks and religious and neo-conservative propaganda channels with my fiction, they get none of my money.

However, iTunes and Netflix are getting money from us, because those are the streams where I can have the story without the break for commercials, the week long break for the next episode, or the annual hiatus for summer. And if I could have that faster, without the 3 day turnaround, I'd be in heaven. I've done several iTunes programs, especially to "try" out a series by picking up the pilot. It's worked.

What media companies - especially the creative companies - need to realize approximately three weeks ago is that no single service stream is ever going to serve all of the consumers they can potentially reach. Every television provider has missed me for fifteen years. A select few have gotten my tiny dollar contribution via DVD, and a few more would get a larger chunk of my contribution if their programming was available to me for reasonable download. I'm willing to pay creators for my fiction; they're making art that pleases me so they deserve compensation.

Besides, I don't know anyone who still watches television "traditionally" - no one plans to watch a program at a set time. Everyone I know has at very least a VCR and the ability to program it, or more usually a DVR or Tivo and has broken free from the programmers' clocks and advertisers' strangle. Nobody sees commercials anymore; that dollarstream is turning into a dry wash. Media providers would do well to look foreward instead of trying to maintain their dying, frantic grasp on what is a terminal horse (to mix many metaphors) and recognize that On Demand programming is where their future bread and butter lies. Advertisers would do well to realize that commercials are a dying art that must evolve into something else and start directing that evolution, much as a breeder directs the evolution of cattle.