How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV

Part 1: Hyperdistribution. "Now we have a paradox: the invention of an incredibly powerful mechanism for the global distribution of television programming brings with it a fundamental challenge to the business model which pays for the creation of the programs themselves. This is not at all BitTorrent's fault: the technology could have come along a decade ago, and if it had, we'd have stumbled across this paradox in the 1990s. This is a failure of the value chain to adapt to a changing technological landscape — a technological desynchronization between producer and audience. Once again, there's no need to find fault: things have changed so much, and so quickly, I doubt that anyone could have kept up. But the future is now here, and everyone in the creative value chain from producer to audience must adapt to it.

This trend is only going to accelerate with the uptake of broadband throughout the world, progressively hollowing-out the commercial broadcasters until they have returned to their roots: television as a live medium. The only types of programming unsuitable for hyperdistribution are those which are broadcast live: news, event and interactive programming, and sport. Since these are all widely popular, it's not as though the commercial broadcasters will collapse."