The best and probably only good thing about being sick in bed with the flu is that its the perfect opportunity to catch up on trashy television. And no, I'm not talking about Oprah. Thanks to iTunes I went on a downloading binge that included Lost, Battlestar Galactica and even quirkier titles like Eureka, Kyle XY, the Dresden Files, Jericho, Blade and Surface. And that's when I discovered the catch. A lot of a niche programming that ends up on iTunes also ends up getting cancelled. Anyway, it got me thinking. In an on demand future - just how will television get funded? 

TV shows can get axed for all kinds of reasons. A competitive time slot against American Idol, fickle audience ratings or a studio executive having a bad hair day. Ironically, a lot of these shows are now ending up on the iTunes store making it a kind of elephant graveyard for discarded television. However, if you read through the user comments on these shows you will notice something interesting. In many cases, although these shows tanked on first broadcast - over time they have managed to accumulate a large and loyal audience. Trouble is, by the time that happens - its generally too late and everyone has moved on. So even if niche audiences want to buy niche content - the economics just don't match with the way that television is currently produced. So much for the long tail.

There's a book by Stephen Johnson that's as interesting as its title. Its called 'Everything Bad is Good For You' and one of its big ideas is that as popular culture becomes more complex, consuming it actually makes you smarter not dumber. Its a tantalising possibility and certainly right on the major point. TV drama is getting more complicated. Multiple character arcs, hidden clues, threaded story lines, obscure referencing and pay offs that can take multiple seasons to crystallize. Its also why buying DVD box sets of complete seasons provides a better experience than trying to watch shows as they trickle broadcast each week. And more tellingly, why downloading TV may be even better than DVD.

There are several reasons for this. Subscribing to a show, and having the latest episode pushed to you as soon as its ready beats waiting for your local network to screen last season's episode, or deciding to remove a series altogether from their programming schedule. Secondly - online delivery fits well with the way that the new generation of consumers will increasingly discover entertainment. Namely, through each other. Network based discovery examples include forwarded links to YouTube clips, embedded videos on social media profiles or intelligent recommendations from aggregators like iTunes or Amazon. Thirdly, there is a wealth of online content about television - reviews, fan material, episode analysis and audience detective work - just waiting to be aggregated and presented as an overlay on the original show. It makes decoding a series like Lost a lot easier, and is a hell of a lot better than any trite DVD extras feature. And now that it has become simpler to display downloaded content on garden variety televisions, all of the above will be increasingly relevant to your average, rather than alpha geek audience member.

Except for one thing. Most of the television currently available for legal download was formatted and financed by an entirely different business model. It wasn't made for individual episode retail. It was designed to deliver mass audiences at a particular point of time, and financed accordingly. And even then, most shows only become really profitable when enough seasons have been made for the series to go into a syndicated repeat cycle.

So, without a fat network output deal - who would be crazy enough to spend millions of dollars per episode for a desert island drama with polar bears and invisble dinosaurs? You certainly couldn't rely on a user pays model unless you were very sure that they would indeed pay. One possibility is that in the short term we will see more cheap and cheerful web entertainment, like Michael Eisner's Prom Queen series on Myspace. Certainly, the present immaturity of new media business models means that the only current solution for profitability is to keep production costs low. However in the longer term,  prepaid sales like the 'Season Pass' feature on iTunes may become a more important metric in determining whether pilots get turned into series, and series continue into a second season.

That's not to say that the advertising funded model is dead. Quite the contrary. We are just now seeing the beginnings of the ultimate mash up between the targeting and price effificency of Google's Adwords with the brand impact of television advertising. The tricky bit to get right is measuring and delivering advertising when viewing is not concentrated at a particular time and on a particular channel, but fragmented across millions of sites, devices, and moments. If you read between the lines, that's what the new Newscorp joint venture with NBC is all about - creating a decentralized platform to commercialize eyeballs on content - whether they be on a portal, a social network, a blog site or even shared directly between consumers themselves.

The important thing to realise about all of this is that the future of television is not being driven by greedy media executives trying to be more creative about making more money. Or not entirely, anyway. There are deep changes in the nature of audiences and entertainment consumption taking place. Unfortunately, how fast those trends become solidified into everyday couch potato reality is as much in the hands of the lawyers as the bean counters. And that's never a good thing.