Wired has a couple stories on Jon Stewart and Yahoo. Excerpt:
Wired: Yet there’s a lot of venture capital going into video-delivery technologies that could allow more shows to go online. Isn’t there something promising about new ways to watch television?
Stewart: Sure. But how much do you need TV to be available in convenient form? It already is convenient – we have the DVR. Do you need TV on your watch as you walk from your cell phone to your BlackBerry? At what point do we get saturated enough to say, “OK, I get it! We can get anything we want at any time! Let’s go sit around a large table and eat a meal in silence”? Sometimes this shit’s just overkill.
Karlin: I do think it would be cool if at one point your computer and your television are more or less the same device. That’s one less big box screen that you have in your house.Wired: Ben, I read something in which you talked about how network television and cable were going to become one and the same.
…
Stewart: It’s the idea that the content is no longer valued by where it stands, in what neighborhood it lives. What matters is what you put out there, not its location. I think that’s what people have come to learn from the Internet – it doesn’t matter where it comes from. If it’s good, it’s good. Just because our channel is after HGTV and right before Spanish people playing soccer doesn’t make it any less valuable than something that exists in the single digits on your television set.
Karlin: The bottom line is network television is going to have to figure out a way to produce its shows less expensively in order to survive and compete. And cable shows are going to have to figure out a way to pay people a little more, probably, as they start getting the same kind of revenue out of their shows that the networks get.
