how to take a tv network online, today, for cheap.

Television sells two things: collected content (DVD box sets) and eyeballs. The eyeballs are generally sold through a series of half-truths and guesses, known collectively as ‘Nielsen Ratings’.

What I don’t understand, is the inability of television to monetize ‘piracy’, because they aren’t selling content, primarily. They sell eyeballs and packaged collections. Those things can’t be ‘stolen’ online, really. In the case of eyeballs, piracy is literally just another market. Here’s how you take advantage of it, in a reasonably simple way, at a reasonably low cost.

Make every show you air available online, at the time of release, via bit torrent. Host the tracker on your own servers, so you can monitor the downloads of each individual show. Make it all you can eat, relying on bit torrent distribution to make sure you don’t get killed with bandwidth costs.

Geo-sort your traffic. Create localized versions of your tracker by country, or by timezone, or by town. Track the volume of each episode, and each show, downloaded by each area. For greater segmentation, ask users to create profiles that collect their information - incentivize this by letting them comment on each individual series or episode. Attach a wiki to each series or episode, and let users discuss and argue about plot lines and potential direction.

With these collections of geographical, demographic, and viewership information, reach out to advertisers, on a national, timezone, local, and hyper local level. Instead of selling ad space by show and timezone, sell it by city. All this costs is in sorting, and in editing the right mix of ads into the show, for each of your potential markets. You can price individual shows up, or down, based on the demographics and viewership information.

This doesn’t include potential membership or sponsorship revenue for the online forum created around the tracker. This also lets you sell ad space in the same show multiple times over, and reach out to hyper local businesses - a niche that Groupon has proven can be particularly profitable.

This is all existing content, and a more or less existing sales framework. This is LITERALLY just updating the TV monetization model in the most obvious way, with existing technology, at minimal cost.

And no one is doing it. Who is going to be first?