Network television's hidden plea to get content on YouTube

The rules of engagement within the television broadcasting industry are changing -- everyone knows this. But the trusted guard of influential and mind-shaping TV is ill-equipped (as always) to change at the breakneck pace it needs to and therefore new, disruptive industries swing by for a chat and end up making up new rules. Case in point: Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) YouTube.

While YouTube is not a replacement for television at this time (lower quality, internet connection needed, etc.), it is becoming increasingly so for some people. As that list grows steadily but surely, the big studios -- like the music and newspaper industries before them -- will learn to compete or face the defection of ad clients and audiences to newer online media that don't have such a tightfisted control over content. Consumers demand more -- and they are getting it here in the infancy of internet TV.

Will studios like Viacom Inc. (NYSE:VIA) and General Electric Co.'s (NYSE:GE) NBC use backhanded tactics to get their respective programming on YouTube? Sure they would, as a last-second desperate tactic. The largest video portal in the world is YouTube, not Viacom or NBC; but like I said earlier, YouTube needs to step up things quite a bit to achieve the quality and accessibility freely available analog networks now have (until 2009 when digital TV will be mandatory).

Once that internet connection in all those homes, apartments, condos and other living structures is as common as running water, the age of internet TV will have really arrived. If traditional studios think they have it bad now, it's not even close. So, to all network television execs -- better start ponying up for those partnerships unless you want to explain to your largest advertisers the audience shift out of your properties and onto ... YouTube. Next up -- the Apple TV's capability to change the game, in traditional Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) style.