"And that's before we get into paying the cost of delivering the video in high quality to your HDTV or iPad, since it's hardly cheap to house and stream hi-def

"And that's before we get into paying the cost of delivering the video in high quality to your HDTV or iPad, since it's hardly cheap to house and stream hi-def to tens of millions of homes". Except it IS cheap to distribute content on the Internet. Shows are already being distributed to millions of homes without costing the content owners a dime (It's just currently being done illegally using bit-torrent).