It costs a bloody fortune to produce a television series like Mad Men. All those cast members, the period costumes, the smart writers. Right now production companies make these efforts profitable by doing deals with networks like A&E that sell advertising spots. Many of us are recording our favorite shows and watching them later, watching them on Hulu or perhaps YouTube, or getting them through NetFlix. And lots of people are just shifting their attention to all the content that we can watch on the web these days. Nicholar Carr’s column in the NYTimes Magazine bemoans the possible loss of high quality shows as we move from subscription services to free ones. And it goes without saying that as people do that, there is a possibility that people will be paying less attention to advertising.

Here’s what I think is going to happen. Almost all video content is going to be distributed over the web or perhaps, if something like Canoe in cable ever works, over some other technology that mimics most of what the web can do. Like most web content there’s not going to be any reason why people need to watch things at a particular point in time. This opens up the possibility that video can have targeted online advertising. So instead of wasting money on ads that hardly any viewer care about, advertisers will be able to target possible leads. Unfortunately, for those seeking a revenue stream there is such an explosive growth in the supply of online advertising inventory that can be targeted, even the prices for these are destined to plummet. I just don’t see how in the long run television networks or stations can expect to command anything like the prices they are currently getting from eyeballs. It will also become harder to charge for subscriptions for the reasons Carr mentions—why pay Comcast a bundle when you can see what you want when you want for a lot less.

Where I part company from Carr is I think all the nostalgia is misplaced. We have an industry that made a lot of products available on the back of the advertising revenue model. It won’t be able to do that going forward and a lot of what’s done now in the television and movie business will go the way of the typewriter I’m afraid. But remember, before we had this industry with “high quality” shows such as Mad Men, people actually read books and did all sorts of other things. We’ve now had several knowledge-starved generations who spent their time watching everything from Gilligan’s Island to the Real Housewives of New Jersey. The new web model will give us different kinds of content but there’s no obvious reason why it won’t generate pearls just like television has over the years.

I think it comes down to this: if there is something that people really value entrepreneurs will figure out a way to make it available. If people really aren’t willing to pay for the stuff on television then that tells us something. Likewise newspapers. My guess is that high quality content will appear for people that want high quality content. It will take time for this to happen and the end result will look a lot different than Mad Men. But then again no one would have imagined in the first half of the 20th century that people would be sitting in front of a screen watching anything like the modern television series.