Brave New TV Land

Dick Wolf looked skeptically at the shiny new video iPod he had given his 12-year-old son for Christmas, and prepared to watch a downloaded version of 24 for the first time. "Who's going to see anything on this screen?" shrugged the 59-year-old TV producer, whose Law & Order dramas favor gritty, realistic street scenes over high-tech gadgetry and geekspeak. But when Wolf inserted the white earbuds and started watching the 2.5-in. LCD, he had an epiphany. "The screen size became meaningless. I was in the moment. After 30 seconds, I knew it would change the game."

The game is the $60 billion television industry. When the savvy producer pitched a new crime show called Power to NBC, he made sure to play up its download-ready qualities. In Wolf's words: "I drank the Kool-Aid." As Wolf and other producers sell their wares in the annual TV-industry ritual known as development season, new technologies are changing the way they do business. With high-quality video available on 200 million PCs via broadband, 200 million 3-GB mobile phones, an estimated 4 million iPods and other devices, the Big Four networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox) are scrambling for ways to deliver content over a panoply of platforms. They are also scrambling to figure out a business model that can predictably deliver profits in this variegated market.

It used to be that hit shows aired once or twice on a TV network, then had an afterlife in seemingly endless reruns on local stations or down-the-dial cable outfits. Today, however, series such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica and The Office are treated to multiformat distribution: they are sold as downloads or video-on- demand, cut and clipped for cell phones and marketed via online video blogs or audio podcasts, sometimes hours after they air on television. Or sometimes before. Late last month, NBC debuted another new Wolf drama, Conviction, on Apple's iTunes weeks before its network premiere, to generate buzz for the series.

Those new distribution channels are reconfiguring the programming process. "You can't look at a program anymore in terms of just airing on TV," says Larry Gerbrandt, a senior analyst for Nielsen Media Research. "The network has become the first of multiple windows and screens that get exploited. They're now beginning to view themselves as more than broadcasters." An IBM Institute for Business Value study in January was even more blunt: "This is the beginning of the 'end of television as we know it.'"

The so-called end-time began last October, after ABC agreed to put Lost and Desperate Housewives on Apple's iTunes store as $1.99 downloads, giving viewers their first taste of (legal) Internet access to hit shows. "Every new-technology company had been courting us," recalls Disney-ABC TV president Anne Sweeney. "It's one thing to discuss possibilities, but when we saw the video iPod and iTunes store, the consumer experience was so vibrant, it convinced us that this was the right technology." Within a month, CBS and NBC made plans to offer some of their top shows as 99¢ video-on-demand selections through cable company Comcast and satcaster DirecTV, and soon Google, AOL (owned, like TIME, by Time Warner) and others joined the party.