One of the major effects of Netflix and other streaming services’ move into the original content market has been the prospect of reviving cancelled television shows away from the networks that did them in. Netflix showed that it was serious in part by inking a deal to bring back cult favorite Arrested Development, which chronicles the experiences of a deeply dysfunctional family after its real estate empire collapses. Shows like that, and the long-mourned Firefly will always have their defenders. And now, any cancelled network show seems like it’ll go through the same process that Terra Nova did, where after its network cuts it loose, there will be at least a semblance of discussion about whether it should live again on one of the streaming services. But what of the shows that were cancelled before that option was added to the lifecycle? Or that haven’t developed Freaks and Geeks-like followings, but were solid and worthy shows none the less? Here are five shows that deserve a second lease on life—or a first look, if you haven’t checked them out yet.

1. Better Off Ted: Think The Office, but higher up on the food chain. The main character, Ted, runs a research and development division of a cheerily evil corporation, Veridian Dynamics, where he works for the conscienceless but strangely endearing Veronica (Portia di Rossi, absolutely on comedic fire). At a time when we’re both intensely aware of corporate callousness, but the economy doesn’t have a lot of room for us to run off and pursue our dreams, like Linda, the show’s product-tester-turned-children’s-book-author, Better Off Ted was both hilarious and cathartic.

2. Kings: Look, I’d pay money to watch Ian McShane curse the heavens as a standalone weekly enterprise. But there were terrific, long-game stories to be told here about the governance of Gilboa; Jack Benjamin’s repression of his sexuality in the name of dynastic succession (Sebastian Stan should have won Emmys for that performance); the role of the media in public opinion; and how health care reform affects a nation at risk of plague. Plus, it was a gorgeous example of how production design can create a new world that should have been a role model for other science-fictional and futurist shows.

3. The Unusuals: The casting was just ridiculous: Amber Tamblyn and Jeremy Renner as cops partnered in the wake of Renner’s partner’s death; Adam Goldberg and Harold Perinneau as another pair, the first of whom was dying of a brain tumor he refused to treat, the later terrified to die young; Chris Sarandon as Tamblyn’s wealthy father she’s trying to prove she doesn’t depend on. And the show was a smart, sometimes surreal reinvention of the cop genre, moving the cases away from murders to explore everything from New York’s old crime families to Alzheimer’s. If I could have only one show back, it would probably be this.

4. Prime Suspect: That this smart remake failed to find an American audience is a failure of that audience. We still need shows about sexism in American law enforcement. And Maria Bello was fantastic. Not every show has to be high-concept. I wish this smart, solid, fun procedural had survived.

5. No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency: I wish this show was still going less for the show itself, and more for the fact that it helped stand up Botswana’s film industry. It’s disappointing, if inevitable, that we’d get a show set in Africa and with African characters through the creation of a white male writer. But it would be really nice to get American audiences used to watching shows set in non-American countries, and with characters where the default setting isn’t white American. Especially when it comes to solving mysteries.

Deadline reports the latest Rentrak data about DVD rentals:

Consumers spent $5.65B renting DVDs and Blu-ray discs in 2011, Rentrak says this morning citing data from its Home Video Essentials tracking service. That’s down 3.4% from 2010. But consumer defections from disc rentals appear to be accelerating. In the last three months of the year, rentals were -21.3% from the same period in 2010, as business at kiosks — including Redbox, which charges $1.20 a night — grew by 28%.

I’m not sure if this data includes Netflix rentals, but in any case, the same trend is roughly true for that company as well: now that subscriptions to Netflix DVD and streaming services are separate, subscriptions to the DVD-by-mail service are down. And we don’t have data yet about whether the end of Netflix’s streaming deal with Starz, which means that a bunch of content that was previously available streaming is now only available by mail, is driving consumers back to the DVD service.

My guess is that ultimately DVDs will become a luxury-item business. People will still want to buy fancy box sets with extra features that come all wrapped up in gorgeous packaging for their very favorite things. But most of us, they’ll become an inconvenience: the discs and the cases will take up space, and even a several day wait to get them will seem so irritatingly slow as to not be worth it for all but the most desirable content. And making both video and books impulse purchases that are instantly available may increase how much we use them. Netflix streaming’s grown to be a huge proportion of internet use, and while the numbers are self-reported, there’s some data to suggest that e-reader owners buy and read more books. It’ll just be interesting to see at which point television and music creating companies accept that they’re in the same position book publishers are, and offer dual formats rather than pushing DVDs over downloads. Ultraviolet is a step in the right direction, but I’m not sure getting cloud storage space with a disk is as attractive as getting cloud storage space with a download: the whole point of cloud storage is not having to deal with those pesky discs and format transfers.

Yesterday, I wrote about what I think is one of the central cruxes of making streaming video profitable: whether we’re willing to give content distributors more data about us and permission to distribute more of it to advertisers in order to make streaming more profitable and potentially cheaper for us. Turns out the Federal Trade Commission is considering exactly the same challenge in its report laying our recommendations to businesses and policymakers about protecting consumer privacy while satisfying consumer desires in an age when technology is undergoing rapid change. A key section:

Many commenters expressed support for the general principle that companies should limit the information they collect from consumers. Despite the broad support for the concept, however, many companies argued for a flexible approach based on concerns that allowing companies to collect data only for existing business needs would harm innovation and deny consumers new products and services. One commenter cited Netflix’s video recommendation feature as an example of how secondary uses of data can create consumer benefits. The commenter noted that Netflix originally collected information about subscribers’ movie preferences in order to send the specific videos requested, but later used this information as the foundation for generating personalized recommendations to its subscribers.

In addition, commenters raised concerns about who decides what a “specific business purpose” is. For example, one purpose for collecting data is to sell it to third parties in order to monetize a service and provide it to consumers for free. Would collecting data for this purpose be a specific business purpose? If not, is the only alternative to charge consumers for the service, and would this result be better for consumers?

The FTC lays out a very basic principal from these challenges, the idea that “Companies do not need to provide choice before collecting and using consumer
data for practices that are consistent with the context of the transaction or the company’s relationship with the consumer, or are required or specifically authorized by law.” But we’re a long way from defining “consistent with the context of the transaction.” And consent and will are not necessarily among the things companies can grok about us from the data they’re gathering.

Apparently, David Fincher is telling Netflix that $100 million isn’t enough for him to produce 26 episodes of his remake of the British masterpiece House of Cards. It’s not entirely clear yet whether MRC, the company that is producing the show for Netflix, will ante up or whether the project will collapse. But either way, the debate over that project–and the news that Netflix is considering picking up another expensive project, Fox castoff Terra Nova, illustrate the challenges of original content upstarts like Netflix, Hulu, Yahoo and Amazon as they seek to create hit shows.

The logic of the House of Cards remake is more in its constituent parts than as a whole. Fincher is an immensely talented and acclaimed director with fans who will follow any project he’s involved with, and he is very buzzy after the success of his Facebook origin story The Social Network. House of Cards is a venerable project with a pedigree that could appeal to fans of British-inflected drama, particularly riding the coattails of the Downton Abbey craze. I get why Netflix would want that prestige. Like Lillyhammer, the House of Cards project has names attached that make people sit up and think, and production values that are frankly much better than Hulu’s Battleground.

But taken together, I’m not sure the project ever made sense. There’s no particular creative mandate for the remake, no equivalent to the Afghanistan war that makes Sherlock feel like a fresh update on Arthur Conan Doyle’s character. The original show was 12 hour-long episodes, and the American order would more than double it, for no particularly discernible reason other than Netflix’s desire to have a show as long as a standard American television order. Fincher has a well-established reputation for being prickly and not particularly cost-conscious, which may not be great qualities for a company that, as it gets into the business, wants a hitch-free success.

Then, there’s Terra Nova, which has approximately nothing in common with the other shows in Netflix original content pool. It isn’t a resurrection of a show with huge cultural cachet that was killed before its time and could bring in a rabid pool of long-time fans, like Arrested Development. It doesn’t have a hook with an actor or a director, like Steven Van Zandt in Lillyhammer or Fincher with House of Cards. America’s basically just indicated that it doesn’t much want an incoherent and dull science fiction show decked out with the occasional dinosaur, and Fox has indicated it doesn’t think it can make money off the concept. So the appeal for Terra Nova is nigh-unfathomable, unless it wants a reputation as a company that dats off network castoffs.

All in all, these are weird investments for Netflix when it could be spending some money, say, following Game of Thrones‘ success and adapting a popular book series, or buying a show from a beloved auteur like Dan Harmon, or any one of a number of options. I get that Netflix is reaching for everything at once. But there’s nothing wrong with spending less and being slightly less grand if the project the company ends up funding is actually the sum of its parts.

We’ve discussed what Netflix’s identity might look like if it started packaging its streaming content and original programming into a cable channel. It turns out, that development might come sooner than expected: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is apparently already meeting with cable executives. And for those of you who are dying for a stand-alone HBO option, this might be the most interesting potential development if Netflix gets a cable channel:

A cable deal would increase Netflix’s competition with Time Warner’s HBO, but could allay fears among TV distributors that Netflix will lead to consumers’ cutting the pay TV cord. At least one cable company could end up experimenting with offering Netflix by the end of the year, even though the company would have to modify its content licensing deals, which currently typically don’t allow Netflix to bring programming to cable set-top boxes, according to Reuters…[Tony] Wible also suggested that HBO could react by also offering its HBO Go service directly to consumers. A spokesman for HBO declined to comment. HBO and Time Warner executives have in the past signaled that HBO Go allows for the option to market to consumers directly, but there was no financial benefit for such an approach for now.

I’ve said in the past that HBO is a very careful steward of its business model. And whether Netflix is on cable or not, it still won’t have HBO’s content. The question is whether HBO remains confident that its content is valuable enough that consumers will pick it a their add-on to cable if they’re choosing between HBO and Netflix.

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.

In the wake of the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger, much of the attention’s been on low-rated NBC’s efforts to right itself. But yesterday, the company made two big announcements about very different parts of its future. First, fulfilling some of the terms of the deal, Comcast said it’ll launch four new channels, two aimed at African-Americans (including one backed by Magic Johnson) and two at Latinos. And, investing in the technological future of viewership, the company said it’s starting a video-on-demand service that will include legacy television shows and movies.

Given the massive success of Univision, and the fact that the best networks seem to be able to offer Latino audiences is either Rob Schneider’s bumbling through the family his character married into on Rob or Sofia Vergara as a transplanted bombshell, it makes sense that someone would try to go more aggressively after that rapidly growing market sector. It’s hard to tell what El Rey, the first of those two channels, will offer: “a mix of reality, scripted and animated series, movies, documentaries, news, music, comedy, and sports programming” isn’t exactly descriptive. But I do think it’s promising that the network’s saying out of the gate that they’ll hire Latino producers. You would think that would be a given for programming aimed at a Latino audience, but I don’t exactly take it for granted. And I think that “BabyFirst Americas,” which is a truly terrible network name, could actually find an audience in households where the first language is English. Bilingual education is going to be a lot more important in the future, and quality programming for children in Spanish could be a great educational tool for parents who want their kids growing up with multiple languages no matter which one they themselves speak.

I tend to think the African-American focused networks are a bit less significant, if only because the networks made a strategic decision to abandon black audiences a long time ago, and BET, TVOne, and VH1 have been trying to pick up that lost audience ever since. That said, I’m at least mildly interested to see what the folks behind REVOLT mean by this: “REVOLT will be live, like all great moments in television history. REVOLT will also be immediate, like today’s social networks,” because it’s so goofily futuristic. I’d be more compelled if the marketing material said something about building out mobile-friendly products, given the role that mobile plays in bridging the digital divide. But we’re a couple years out from seeing what they develop.

And speaking of digital, the bigger news for Comcast is probably the announcement that it’s building a Video on Demand service to challenge Netflix. They’re not just pulling in content from the NBCUniversal family, which makes it a somewhat more aggressive move than HBO and Showtime’s construction of separate, Netflix-like portals for their shows and movies. Those investments by individual channels could be interpreted as negotiating moves to show Netflix they’re willing to hold out, or attempts to preserve the sense that their content is ultra-premium. But Comcast seems like they’re trying to provide a genuine alternative, even if the content library they’re starting out with is relatively small. But given that Netflix is in the process of renegotiating contracts, and has had to pay higher fees to reup, there could be room for a company with a serious cash library to stock up fast. And a streaming or VOD service could provide an alternative way to keep alive low-rated but passionately-loved shows like Community that might not be earning their spot in a network lineup, but could draw subscribers to a streaming service.

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.

The bridge is yours.

-60 percent of the content Netflix users stream is television shows rather than movies.

-Supervillains in American politics.

-The ruins of Jim Bakker’s Christian amusement park.

-Finally, a reasonably accurate map of Panem!

-Tell me, Nick Fury, how has the world changed?

GamePolitics reports that along with Netflix’s plans to spin off Qwickster, the company’s plan to move into video game rentals is dead, mostly because the company believes that streaming is the future:

If you were hoping that Netflix was still considering renting video games like it does with disc-based movies, let that hope die tonight. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said today on a call to discuss the latest quarter’s earnings, that the idea was dead and laying in a shallow grave right next to the one about renaming its disc-based rental service to “Quickster.” The company’s streaming subscriber base outnumbers DVD users by two to one, and in the last quarter they lost 2.76 million DVD subscribers. So the whole idea of renting games would go against where the company expects the bulk of subscriber base to end up soon: streaming only. If you’ve watched any of its recent launches in new regions like Canada and the UK, you’ll note that those areas are streaming only.

But over at Wired, Tim Carmody sounds a note of caution of what that move towards streaming means for Netflix’s financial health:

That 24.4 million includes 21.67 million streaming subscriptions in the US (just slightly up from 21.45 million last quarter) and 11.17 million DVD-by-mail subscriptions — which is quite sharply down from 13.93 million last quarter. Still, those DVD-by-mail subscriptions contributed $194 million of profit on only $370 million in revenue. Streaming, meanwhile, brings in $476 million in revenue, but only nets $52 million for Netflix’s bottom line…Outside the US, meanwhile, Netflix is streaming-only — and still not profitable at all. Netflix lost $60 million on its international streaming business last year, with slightly under 2 million subscribers — a loss that more than cancels out its total profit from all 21.67 million US streaming customers.

He also points out that companies like HBO and Amazon, which have build their own proprietary streaming platforms, are holding onto their most valuable subscribers, which gives them an advantage against Netflix, which is shedding the people who make it the most money.

This, I think, is where Netflix’s original programming comes in. If Netflix can build properties that it owns entirely and are valuable enough to draw in new subscribers, or that other platforms want to distribute, that could be a valuable source of revenue for the company. Or, that content could provide leverage with the legacy media companies that would allow Netflix to push back on some of the price increases it’s faced as the company has re-upped content deals. Either way, there’s no question that reports of Netflix’s death were premature. But the company is confronting challenges that will be important not just for Netflix, but for the future of the streaming industry as a whole.