As I said in another comment below, I would argue that funding TV shows today is the bad idea. Those producing them still earn lots of money for them and their friends. Production is still very lucrative. I just would not want to be an outsider investor.
Part of it was driven by growth in cable revenue. Customers are paying nearly 30 dollars a month that gets passed to cable stations.
I think another part of it was the assumption that netlix and Amazon will payout to get a license to your content later.
But really I think it's the collapse of the broadcast networks. It used to be everyone just watched whatever the big four had on. So now the wealth is being spread.
This is probably true, but I don't think it's permanently true. What we're seeing right now is a war between the old distribution networks and the new streaming networks. And the actors, show runners and tradesmen who produce TV are the weapons being used in that war. Just like it's great to be a defense contractor during an actual war, it's great to be in the business of producing TV during the period which will ultimately mark either the shift to online distribution, should Amazon, Netflix and Hulu win over customers, or the insurgency of online distribution should Cable survive. But one side will win and the gravy train will end.
What's interesting is that the premium services are likely to be okay no matter what. They've had to survive in a world where they've had to justify the cost of their programming for quite a while now. For them, this war will only determine how their programming is delivered to viewers so long as they hedge their bets and allow viewers to watch through both distribution channels. The only important thing for them is that their shows remain popular. That's why HBO has publicly said they don't mind people sharing passwords for their service...they can afford to leave money on the table right now so long as it means they'll still be relevant once the dust settles. As long as that happens, they can crack down then and ensure that everyone is paying.
However once a winner emerges, which I think most of us believe will be streaming, production will scale back and profits will increase. There is too much TV being produced right now and customers are forced to either miss shows that they'd otherwise like to watch or devote way too much of their lives to trying to keep on top of that. We could pull back by a factor of 2 and almost everyone would still be able to find plenty enough to be satisfied.
Does that include everyone who had purchased the season for streaming from Amazon? Everyone who watched it later on Netflix? Everyone who watched it through their cable company's on-demand feature?
In the 60s to 70s, the US had 3 networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS), few shows, low budgets even for hit shows (think of Gilligan's Island and Brady Brunch), and massively greater viewership than today[1]. And the average American viewer watched 4.5 hours of TV per day and knew the name of every prime time show on TV.
Today, every point above is reversed: hundreds of channels, hundreds of shows, something like one-tenth the viewership per show[1], and people watch much less TV.
To give one example of budgets, an entire episode of Star Trek cost about the same as just the voices on a Simpsons episode. (Star Trek cost $185,000 per episode, or $2.2M in today's dollars; the 6 main voices actors of The Simpsons were collectively getting $2.4M per episode but cut to $1.8M a couple years ago.)
The only conclusion is that TV in the 60s and 70s was obscenely profitable and TV today is a marginal or money-losing business and covertly subsidized by other parts of the company's business.
[1] The final episode of MASH had 125 million viewers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M*A*S*H_%28TV_series%29
The final episode of Breaking Bad had just 10 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad#Viewership