For the owners and shareholders of TV networks, solutions tend to fall in one of two mutally exclusive groups:

Option #1: Take advantage of all these people who say they'll pay. In the short term, you'll probably lose a lot of money as you cannibalise your existing business model. But it does give you a moderate chance of long term survival.

Option #2: Keep the status quo. In the short term, you'll continue to be mildly profitable, though your long term survival is unlikely.

Since markets reward short-term behaviour, the first option is career suicide for any CEO. While the second won't mark them out as a visionary, it will guarantee them a large salary. What would you choose?

Currently, TV Company X makes a bunch of shows and airs them in the US. Some of them make huge amounts of money, some fail miserably, most are somewhere inbetween. You make money in the US either by selling your content to networks, or putting it on your own network. The networks make money out of selling subscriptions (B2C) and advertising (B2B).

Internationally, you sell your content to networks in other countries. These will be whole bundles of content - let's say 5 shows, each with 3 series. This is a purely B2B business model, with guaranteed future income. Once the local networks have licensed the content from the producer, they promote it and sell their own advertising and subscriptions.

It seems that you're suggesting they replace that international model with one where they sell content online direct to consumers. The producer now has to take over all the marketing of the show, and sell its own advertising. They will also come up against local competition who are now making their own shows. And they've got to build websites with payment systems, and offer customer service. Oh, and deal with local regulators.

It will take a very long time to set up that new business model, and while they're doing it, they've lost all the guaranteed income of just licensing it to local networks. Their share price tanks as a result, and they have to deal with Carl Icahn launching a takeover bid.

Then there's the evidence that the number of people who will pay to consume large amounts of content online, while still accepting advertising, is still relatively small internationally, because not everyone has the technical capability or inclination to do it.

That is why it loses a huge amount of money in the short term. TV producers can't say 'iTunes or whatever'. They have to hire departments of people to build cashflow forecasts and business models that they can justify to shareholders. And if the CEO of TV Company X turns out to be wrong, they've lost their job with the $10M per year salary.

In the long run, it probably will be the case that TV will be distributed like you say - aired through the internet, pay-to-play. But if it's not happening quickly enough for you, then just download the torrents. It's more profitable for TV Network X to ignore the money you're offering than to change their entire business model so they can accept them.

That model has been a disaster (for music companies) as they take all the risk for the failures, while Apple gets a relatively large proportion of revenue from the winners.

I was merely trying to show how the market landscape is not the rosy "piracy is always good" situation TorrentFreak tends to suggest it is.

I don't get where this personal attack is coming from or why what I said prompts passive aggression, but I'll concede the point that I'm frustrated with an industry that prefers to whine about piracy instead of just selling stuff to people. And for what it's worth they don't make those shows, they just market them. Or, you know, fail to market them.

Now we've crossed into fantasyland, of stuff you've just made up because it flatters your viewpoint.

Film studios provide enormous amounts of resources for the making of movies. Furthermore, it's common for movies to be part-owned or whole-owned by people involved in their production. It's not like the music industry. Top producers, backed by lots of monetary and social capital, make these shows happen. Often writers and directors are also producers. Sometimes people get screwed (famously Peter Jackson) but this seems to happen to few makers with critical jobs, and you'll note he didn't get fooled again.

Of course it is not the case that assorted writers and actors and artists can get together and make a hit show with no expert knowledge. TV shows are very, very hard to make. We're not talking about an exploited proletariat of TV show makers here.

Film director here. I'd recommend spending some time Googling "Hollywood accounting".

It's EXTREMELY common for directors to get screwed out of profit deals on films - so much so that the default advice to new film directors is "assume that you'll never see any money from your points on the deal, no matter how profitable the film is."

Peter Jackson's case is not unusual because he was screwed, it's unusual because he fought so hard and so loudly.

I also dislike the implicit assumption that the category of "people who make movies and TV" is "directors". Some directors take a major role in production. Others are tools in a chain, albiet important and highly paid ones. There are lot of people who bring about movies and TV that aren't directors. Vince Gilligan rarely directs, for example.