In between Google and Facebook, it’s easy to feel like the constant target of a data mining operation that’s garnering an uncomfortable amount of information about our personal lives. But a recent post in Deadline suggests that advertisers feel like they aren’t actually getting very much information about the people who are consuming their content when those consumers view a show or a clip online instead of on a set-top television. Here are some of the most relevant breakdowns:

Conventional TV: A :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee on a traditional TV set is included in Nielsen’s C3 estimate for the applicable demographic.

Hulu: That same :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee on Hulu is reported by Hulu to the advertiser as an impression served, with no specific demographic information (Hulu will provide an estimate of the overall composition of site users)…

Mobile devices in home: That same :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee streaming to her iPad (in her home) isn’t captured at all.

Mobile devices away from home: That same :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee on a mobile device (outside her home) is reported by whatever service is delivering the video clip, with no specific demographic.

I’ve always enjoyed Hulu’s option to give feedback about whether an ad is relevant to me, both because it means I’m deluged with less totally irrelevant content, and because I’ve always assumed that I’m helping make the service a better option for both advertisers and content providers by giving them the ability to target me pretty directly. But apparently that’s not the case. And it raises an interesting question for those who want content to be available online for lower out-of-pocket costs than it is now. Would you be willing to give up some of your privacy and to be targeted much more directly by advertisers if it made content distribution on the web more profitable, and more viable?

When Netflix and other content distributors like Hulu and Amazon Prime announced that they were going to start producing their own content in-house, my assumption was that this was really an effort to establish a stronger bargaining position with other content producers by trying to prove that the streaming services could get along without Starz, CBS, or whoever they were negotiating with at a given moment. Now, it seems like one company, at least, might have gotten hooked on making its own content. Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings has suggested at a conference in San Francisco that Netflix will increasingly resemble a cable channel—and he’s said he might even pitch Netflix offering as part of a cable bundle.

All well and good. But given the weird combination of content Netflix has ordered up—the deeply odd mobster-in-Norway comedy Lillyhammer, an inexplicable remake of the British masterpiece House of Cards, and a revitalization of Arrested Development—it’s hard to grok what said channel’s identity would be. I wrote about this for The Atlantic last week as part of a meditation on the confused identities of both Lillyhammer and Hulu’s Battleground:

Over time, most television networks settle on what kind of programming fits their brand: NBC’s known for its quirky comedies, CBS for its bland, broadly appealing sitcoms and cop dramas, ABC is full of soap suds, while HBO goes dark and Showtime goes abrasive. Hulu and Netflix, if they continue to develop full original programming slates rather than using a few original shows as leverage to cut better deals with original content companies, will likely figure out what works for them, too.

But if Battleground and Lillyhammer are any indication, both companies pulling elements from many different kinds of shows together rather than aiming for a single demographic around which they can build an audience. It’s one thing to get people to come to your site because you get them access to everything from Sons of Anarchy to Dora The Explorer. But you’re probably not going to get all of your subscribers, or even a large number of them, to tune in to any given show. The sooner the people who deliver content recognize that, the better their original content projects will be.

Ultimately, if Netflix and Hulu are going to persuade people to subscribe on the strength of their original programming rather than their acquired content libraries, they’re probably going to have to come up with clear brands that are narrower than the scope of their acquisitions. You can’t compete with HBO, and FX, and Showtime, and Starz, and AMC all at once and do it right.

It is a perpetual complaint that cable television is expensive out of proportion to its value, and that it’s expensive because cable bundling means customers are subsidizing channels that they don’t actually want to watch. That structure’s justified by the idea that it provides consumers with choices, even if they’re choices that customers are unlikely to ever make use of. The case against bundling is that even if it would kill some channels and make the remaining ones somewhat more expensive, is that it would let consumers exercise choice up front, paying for what they want in the combinations that they choose—to get BBC America, for example, without buying it with a tranche of other programs, or to get HBO without buying a bunch of other channels first.

And so I’m somewhat less optimistic about a new product called Aereo that’s being heralded as a cable-killer. The idea is that the service, which is premiering in New York in March, would let people rent a tiny antenna that would allow them to stream locally available television channels to any device they want. It’s not entirely clear whether Aereo is legal, something that one would imagine will have to be cleared up before the March 14 launch date. But even if it is legal, I wonder if it’ll actually be in a position to kill cable entirely.

The reason? Aereo’s only got the ability to get people access to the broadcast networks and local channels. It can’t unscramble cable networks. Hulu already gives folks access to the core programming on the broadcast nets, admittedly, with a day delay, and has become vastly more accessible on devices like iPads and streaming on set-top devices, so there’s already a service that’s similar, if not identical, on the market. But their lack of access to programming from some cable channels and all premium cable channels means that Hulu can’t be a complete substitute for a cable subscription. And even for folks who are willing to wait longer, Netflix isn’t either. People like their Bravo, and their ESPN, and their HBO, and their Showtime. As long as they can’t get them in a timely fashion any other way, I think people will continue to pay for cable to get access to those networks, and those shows that have a patina of high value.

This trailer for Paul the Male Matchmaker, the latest in Hulu’s lineup of announced original programming and its second scripted down, is pretty horrifying:

On the other hand, this is a blunt example of what Hollywood thinks is successful: men who essentially despise women and aren’t interested in getting to know them lecturing said women about what it takes to get and keep a man and insisting that they’re worthless without a relationship. I really hope the show is a parody that’s going to aggressively push back on Paul’s condescension, ignorance, and hatefulness. It would be a shame to see a new media venture like Hulu get its original content business off the ground with programming that doesn’t repudiate Hollywood’s worst impulses, and instead, doubles down on them.

Paul Graham, the founder of start-up seeder Y Combinator has decided that the fight over SOPA and PIPA proves that Hollywood is a dying industry, and has issued calls for competitors to kill it:

That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

That’s a big task, and one that comes with formidable obstacles. First, there’s the cost. Hulu’s spending about $500 million on content in 2012. That’s the total cost of making Avatar, including investments in cameras and a $150 million marketing budget. There are other companies that are spending more money, Netflix among them, but that money is going to buy up access to back catalogues as well as to original programming. But the point’s clear: it will take time for rivals to rise up who can spend as much money creating and marketing products as Hollywood does. And while there’s certainly proof that you can make fascinating, visually engaging, and financially successful movies for less than Hollywood typically does (District 9, anybody?) you’re not going to put Hollywood out of business when you’re at a huge disadvantage in terms of making product and getting consumers interested in it.

Second, and relatedly, knowing how to distribute content isn’t the same thing as knowing how to produce it, or to spot what’s good about a project, or to know how to make it work. That means that organizations like Yahoo, Netflix, and Hulu, all tech companies that are producing original content, are going to have a learning curve in producing good material. Particularly if the reason to try to kill Hollywood stems more out of a distate for SOPA than for formulaic storytelling or the lock of straight white men on the industry in a way that limits storytelling. And they’re going to have to figure out how to get customers to consume it regularly without the predictability of a movie release calendar or a network. These challenges aren’t impossible to overcome, but they are a hurdle.

Third, I don’t know that there’s good evidence that there will be a direct tradeoff between movie spending and other forms of entertaining. Video game sales are outstripping movie tickets, but it’s not like movie ticket sales have declined in relation to the rise of video games: in fact, both industries have experienced a similar downturn in the recession. And certainly, video game creators have an interest in Hollywood surviving as a way to spin off games into movies that help extend and make more durable existing franchises. There may be new forms of entertainment in 50 years, but I’m not sure it’s going to entirely replace movies or television, both of which have proven to be durable art forms even as our ways of consuming them change, posing both distribution and storytelling challenges. I don’t doubt that we’ll get new and exciting forms of entertainment. But I don’t think we’ll have to kill Hollywood to get them.

I like Tim Carmody’s piece on the value of old television shows for consumers:

It’s one of the few things that is an order of magnitude easier on a digital service like Netflix than actually popping in a DVD or managing a folder full of torrented movie files: the service perfectly maintains your place in the series, no matter what device you’re using, and you can just hit “play next episode” over and over again. Or you can easily scan for a rewatchable favorite. (Readers with kids know this is particularly useful.)

Full seasons of old television shows perfectly suit the pseudo-ownership viewers have with streaming video. You might keep DVD box sets of some of your favorite series, but you’re not going to buy the complete run of Cheers just to see what the fuss was about. At the same time, you’re unlikely to wait to bittorrent the entire thing or see every episode in syndication, either. It offers a service above and beyond what you can get with a cable subscription or internet broadband alone, for which a broad base of viewer are happy to pay a small sum.

But I think he could have taken this a step further: these services are particularly appealing and valuable because they allow you to do a big-gulp catchup on things you might have missed. If you’re like me and grew up without a television; if you’re an immigrant trying to pick up a bunch of American culture all at once; if your tastes changed over time and where you once cared about 90210 you now care about Roseanne, the ability to sit down and watch all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Cheers in an extended gulp rather than spread out over the years is invaluable. There’s no question that the Internet’s sped up and fractured the conversation around culture, as it has with politics and almost everything else. But it’s also given us tools that let us catch up to and participate in that conversation. Services like Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Amazon Prime serve up nostalgia, but they also let people join in a set of references that would have been inaccessible to them before.

I’ll be on WUNC at 12:40 talking divorce and pop culture. Tune in here if you’re interested.

-The Rock is producing a show about the rise of professional wrestling? Count me in.

-Anxiety at Marvel in advance of The Avengers?

-If you ever wanted to know about the soul-sucking agony of writing a flop, this should answer all your questions.

-Are the networks really surprised that people don’t want to wait eight days to see shows on alternate media?

-I may be totally stuck on and frustrated by Portal, but I would still love to see this movie in theaters:

The bridge is yours.

-Are cloud music lockers in legal trouble?

-Unless there are huge hidden costs or they have major cash flow issues, it is odd that the networks that created Hulu are selling it.

-Surely there are more ways to illustrate that humanity has warring impulses.

-Simulating Iraq.

-Might be sacrilege to the memory of Clarence Clemons, but I would LOVE to see Lisa sit in for him on “Edge of Glory” when Lady Gaga visits Springfield.