Oh, we laugh if Gerard tries to seduce a comely elevator operator as they both ascend the Tour Effeil. That's FUNNY: Heloise wants nothing more than to rush the gaggle of brain-dead Americans out onto the observation deck so she can inhale that third cigarette she didn't get to finish while on break. (She's keyed up because of Marco and the whole fiasco down at the Louvre.) And she has zero interest in interrupting her nicotine zen now by flirting with Gerard. Just look at him. But we're probably not going to laugh if there's a mime floating through the sky on a red umbrella declaring her love silently for Gerard at the same time. We're just not.

Likewise, I also believe we're less inclined to start watching an episode of a television show online if we're forced to watch a 15- or 30-second advertisement or--worse--to wait for some advertising "experience" to load and then efficiently crash our computers. Too much! Too fancy! I just want to watch TV! Alternately, if we're watching a format that has the ability to skip through commercials (some networks' mobile video, for example) we're definitely going to skip through the commercials.

The networks know this, the advertisers know this, and hence, online advertising revenue lags behind broadcast ad revenues--which are being dragged down even further because more people are watching episodes online with their cheap ad rates, perpetuating a vicious-cycle race to the bottom. Predictably, a whole slew of needlessly complicated strategies have emerged to counteract this decline, such as Comcast's proposed TV Everywhere. (If there's one thing I don't need, it's another login name and password.)

Here, then, is my quite unsolicited advice to the television industry about how it might make money with online video the easy way:

1) Think of your product not as discrete bundles ("episodes" or "shows") but as a continuous flow of programming.

You know, just like the old days. Yes, we love our DVRs. But this doesn't mean we have given up the pleasure of losing ourselves watching part of this show, all of the upcoming show and part of the next show after that one, too (including, as a consequence, the commercials in between). As television theorist Raymond Williams--who first appropriated the word 'flow' to describe television--wrote back in the 1970s:

...It is a widely if often ruefully admitted experience that many of us find television very difficult to switch off; that again and again, even when we have switched on for a particular 'programme', we find ourselves watching the one after it and the one after that. The way in which the flow is now organized, without definite intervals, in any case encourages this. We can be 'into' something else before we have summoned the energy to get out of the chair, and many programmes are made with this situation in mind: the grabbing of attention in the early moments; the reiterated promise of exciting things to come, if we stay. But the impulse to go on watching seems more widespread than this kind of organization would alone explain...In the United States it is already possible to begin watching one's first movie at eight-thirty, and so on in a continuous flow, with the screen never blank, until the late movie begins at one o'clock the following morning. It is scarcely possible that many people watch a flow of that length, over more than twenty hours of the day. But the flow is always accessible, in several alternative sequences, at the flick of a switch. Thus, both internally, in its immediate organization, and as a generally available experience, this characteristic of flow seems central. (Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 2nd Edition. Routledge: New York, 1990, pp. 94-95)

While 'flow' as a key concept might seem somewhat nostalgic to many contemporary TV scholars, such nostalgia may not be a bad thing. Indeed, I want to suggest that there is something very pleasurable about the flow of television being "always accessible, in several alternative sequences, at the flick of a switch." And this is something we have lost, perhaps, with the delayed-gratification ("your program will start after this brief word from our sponsors") discrete world of full "episodes" online.

2) Put the flow on the Internet.

Instead of nostalgically bemoaning the loss of television flow in our digital age, why not give in to (and profit from) this collective pleasure? In other words, TV Networks, rather than giving away "episodes" of your shows, why not simply put the live broadcast feed onto your network website--commercials and all? Affiliates left out? Fine. Fantastic! Let them all put the live feed on their sites, too--local commercials and all. And why stop there? Why not have a website in each country? Why not extend your global reach even further?

Radio stations have been doing this successfully for years now. And something similar to what I'm proposing with video is coming to mobile phones soon. After all, who cares where or on what platform someone watches or listens to a commercial. Which brings me to my next point...

3) Protect the flow.

Encrypt the feed. Don't allow viewers to pause, rewind, or fast-forward through the feed. Allow the feed to be embedded wherever--the more places the better--but require users to install a small proprietary player or web plug-in (shared among all the networks) to view it. In this manner, Internet video becomes more attractive to the networks than broadcast television viewed with a DVR.

Of course, some people will install software-based DVRs or otherwise get around the proprietary player, and still others will pirate episodes or even entire blocks of programming. But the number of people this represents will be few. After all, if I can tune in to watch Southpark when it airs (or is re-run) online, or buy it for a modest fee on iTunes if I miss it, I have much less incentive to try to track it down illegally on a file-sharing service. Networks (or licensed third-parties) could also develop their own software-based DVR services that would record programs with commercials and not permit skipping, rewinding, or fast-forwarding.

4) Measure the flow.

The great thing about putting television (as opposed to "episodes") online is that, as I've mentioned a few times, the commercials go online, too. Thus online viewers wouldn't detract from Nielsen television viewership numbers but could only add to them--there would be no reason to differentiate viewers watching television on TV sets, computer screens, or even mobile smartphones. They'd all be watching the same commercials at the same time. Plus, since it's all digital, it would be incredibly easy for the networks (or a third party like Nielsen) to count this segment of the viewership to determine overall ratings and advertising rates.

So there you have my somewhat cheeky provocation on how online TV might become profitable. Of course "platform agnostic" programming strategies have been a holy grail of sorts for media conglomerates for some time, and I don't profess to be the first person to have come to the conclusions above. And as a fan of transmedia, self-contained and original webisodes, and other sorts of as-yet-undiscovered media innovations and combinations, I hope these formats continue to expand as well.

However, broadcast television is what I grew up with, and my nostalgia for this form and desire for it to survive into the future has led me to make the thought experiment above. It may well be naïve, but I remain convinced that--whether on-air or online--the sheer money required to support network and cable television will require executives to think outside the DVR box ("audiences will revolt if they can't pause!") and involve tapping into the simple (and profitable) pleasures of losing oneself in something like the flow of television.

Otherwise, I'm afraid we may be stuck watching Les anges gardiens or Bimboland on DVD...