The move by Electronic Arts to allow non-EA developers to sell games they funded through crowdsourcing and built on their own on the Origin platform for three months without charging them fees to do so strikes me as a really smart, collaborative decision.

One of the things I’ve been doing out in Los Angeles is visiting sets and talking to people about web television. As I think is clear to anyone who’s watched The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl or Husbands, or played an indie game, the challenge isn’t necessarily getting quality products into production—though extra resources and access to equipment never, ever hurt—it’s finding a way for those products to reach the full audience that would enjoy them if only those consumers knew the products existed, and to make those products sustainable. You can develop the best game in the world, but if no one other than the people who crowdfunded it know where to find it, your chances of using that method to leverage yourself into the next level of business so you don’t have to go back to Kickstarter next time are not great.

Legacy media companies, whether it’s video game distributors or the television networks, have an enormous asset in their distribution networks. Even without a big marketing campaign, if your game is populated in a categories list or popping up in a recommendations list based on your other purchases, or if your show automatically starts playing after another program is finished streaming, that’s a huge advantage over simply hosting that game or show on a website and hoping the audience will find its way there. Right now, these games and these shows are small enough that they aren’t necessarily going to compete with big studio productions—either they’re cheaper so it’s not a financial tradeoff, or the games serve different needs—so the studios lose absolutely nothing by opening up their distribution networks to give the indies a boost.

And these early experiments give them a chance to figure out what a business model for collaboration might look like. EA could end up deciding to let indie games stay on for 90 days for free and longer for a fee. They could shorten the free window to a month, and then let games stay for 5 percent of each sale or whatever fee would make this a viable proposition for indie developers who would be getting sales they never would have had access to otherwise, and for the company whose only costs are expanded maintenance of an existing customer service infrastructure. And legacy media companies could track sales and views and advertising revenue to spot new talent. Legacy media and indie media don’t have to be inextricably opposed, and EA’s opening up its sales platform is a perfect illustration of what an experiment in collaboration might look like.

When the Hollywood Reporter noted yesterday that My Damn Channel, an online television network, had unveiled a slate full of original content, it clarified a major problem with web television for me. While YouTube’s channels, like Felicia Day’s Geek & Sundry, will aggregate some similar tranches of web programming, so many of the best shows live off in their own isolated spaces, word of them traveling by word of mouth. I’d watch vastly more web television shows if there was a single place I could find a lot of them, sorted by topic, or theme, or programmed into something approaching harmony. And I wonder why, in their pushes into original programming, Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon haven’t focused more on true web television and less on an arms race with networks that have an enormous advantage over them in production and advertising budgets (Google is, to be fair, spending $200 million advertising its YouTube channels) and savvy.

Much of what these online content providers seem to be doing so far is feeding off scraps or trying to capture old magic. When Terra Nova was cancelled, there were rumors Netflix might pick it up even though it was immediately and obviously a terrible proposition. Its remake of House of Cards, helmed by David Fincher, lacks a creative rationale and is a hugely expensive attempt to purchase the kind of credibility that so many British shows arrive in the states armored in. The Arrested Development reboot is about satisfying an old core audience rather than building a new one. This is a defensive strategy rather than an offensive one. Hulu’s been trying to play offense, but its new shows have no built-in audience unless you count Morgan Spurlock diehards.

Acquiring or distributing existing web TV franchises would be a more modest first step, but it makes sense for a lot of reasons. First, it would be a lower-cost way to bring existing fans of a program to Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon’s streaming site, and in a way that has the potential to be sticky if people jump from a show they already like to one they aren’t familiar with. Second, and this is important, web series offer the potential to catch audience growth on the upswing, rather than the downswing. While this isn’t true for all web series, shows like Jane Espenson’s Husbands can work as individual episodes or, watched all together, as a test pilot. Web shows could be a way for Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon to grow an initial audience and figure out which shows are their best investment bets to level up to full series, and then allocate their production and advertising budgets to shows and showrunners with proven track records in this format.

This is a more modest, less fast way to compete with the networks. But ultimately, it’s hard to believe that the streaming services will truly be able to match network content. They’re viable precisely because people want to pay less for content, and so the streaming services’ best bet is not to try to stretch those dollars threadbare, but to use them to build something entirely different. Google seems to get this. Everyone else? Not so much yet.

The bridge is yours.

-An awesome list of ten web series starring women of color.

-A superhero who’s teaching kids to overcome Tourette Syndrome.

-Not going to lie. Pretty excited for the new Fast and Furious movie.

-Jon Lovitz is not wild about President Obama.

-Ted Nugent may not be a threat to President Obama, but he is a danger to bears.

-So, the new G.I. Joe movie is basically In Like Flint, with the fake president?

I just got into Live From Daryl’s House, the awesome little web series where Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates has musicians over to his house, cooks dinner and eats dinner with them, and then jams with them in his living room. It’s particularly cool to see Hall, a terrific white soul singer, duet with Cee Lo Green, who embraced his inner soul singer later in life, on “Cry Baby,” and to see how good they are when they’re riffing off each other:

I really think one of the better results of the internet for entertainment has been the proliferation of projects that put artists in juxtaposition with each other. It may not be a hugely revenue-generating project to see Cee Lo and Daryl Hall hang out, or to watch Marc Maron and Jeffrey Tambor riff off of each other for an hour, but it’s incredibly useful as a consumer of music and comedy to see what artists can get out of each other in a conversation that I as an interviewer probably couldn’t.

And I also wonder if innovations like this have managed to create an interim career tier for artists. Doing the WTF podcast is probably less stressful and more career enhancing for Maron than gigging around smaller comedy clubs would be. Daryl Hall can tour as much as he wants, of course, but this gig lets him bring collaborators to him once a month and to build a product that doesn’t have a clear place elsewhere. That’s lovely for the artists involved, and it’s also wonderful for us as consumers to have products that don’t fit neatly into other categories, that can be cut to a length that makes sense, and distributed flexibility. I was never someone who had incredibly fidelity to the album in any case (though Cee Lo is always an exception for me), and it’s nice to have options like these on the market instead of them, or in addition to them.

Many organizations, most notably among them Wikipedia, are going dark or gray for today to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act. When they come back, a lot more Americans will likely be aware of the now substantially altered legislation. And my hope, however unlikely, is that after this day of action, we can reset the conversation, especially now that DNS blocking and rerouting appear to be out of play.

It might help for both sides to acknowledge the legitimate fears held by powerful interests on both sides of the SOPA debate. Changing the way the internet is governed, especially after a year when free access to it played a major role in critically important liberation movements, is a hugely momentous thing to propose, even if you feel that your industry is at stake. It may be difficult to quantify the economic impact of piracy, but that doesn’t mean that there is none, or that it’s illegitimate for the people who work in an industry to feel insecurity about its transformation and their prospects for stable employment in it. Tech companies could do more to sell themselves to legacy content providers as beneficial partners. And legacy media companies could spend more time talking to consumers about customer service and cross-platform accessibility than scolding them.

Content and technology companies are not inextricably enemies, and there’s likely to be less and less daylight between them in the future. Netflix is making investments in shows like mob drama Lillyhammer and a remake of the classic British series House of Cards. On a smaller scale, Hulu is doing the same with its unscripted series from Morgan Spurlock and Richard Linklater and its first scripted drama, Wisconsin campaign series Battleground. Tom Hanks’ Playtone production company is making American Gods for HBO — and an animated science fiction series, Electric City, for Yahoo. Google-owned YouTube is shoveling money into content channels curated by actors and celebrities.

These companies may approach their long-term plans for their content differently than movie studios and television networks, and may have different approaches to copyright and distribution than the legacy media organizations. But my bet would be it’s a matter of emphasis rather than of a wholly new approach. It makes much more sense to embrace that connectivity and common interest, and for legacy and new media born out of tech companies to learn as much as they can from each others’ experiences getting rich content to broad audiences on diverse platforms. The SOPA debate has been bruising. But if it helps us lay out the issues that prevent these sides from working together, perhaps it’ll be worth it.

YouTube’s plunged into interesting and uncharted waters by announcing that it will shell out $100 million to a variety of creators ranging from Slate to Ashton Kutcher to develop 100 web television channels. Creators will get up to $5 million to program the channels as they wish, and if they earn back that start-up capital and make more, they’ll make money on the project.

There are, of course, a lot of silly contenders in there. I’m not sure we actually need an American Hipster channel (the fact of its existence probably renders it hopelessly passe, right?), or if Pharrell Williams or Shaq can support their own brands, though if the latter succeeds, maybe we can persuade Peyton Manning to give up football for buddy comedies. One would imagine the Onion doing just dandy — their Onion News Network videos are often, if not always, some of the funniest things on the Internet and it’s possible to see this becoming just another way to aggregate their content.

But what’s exciting about this is that it’s a low-cost way to experiment with niches that aren’t necessarily big enough to justify the investment and start-up costs on television. I’ve often lamented the fact that there isn’t a female equivalent of Louis C.K. getting money from a cable network to produce a tough, low-budget show, but Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls at the Party network might just be it. I absolutely cannot wait to see what the women involved along with Poehler (and if they haven’t though about it, they might bring on Issa Rae’s Awkward Black Girl as an addition to their roster) come up with. There are, of course, spaces where women get to experiment with art and comedy, but they’re fragmented, and there are women who get to do their own thing in a network context if they’re Tina Fey or Whitney Cummings, but the idea of a reasonably well-financed place where women can make weird, engaging comedy, where the operative word is Smart is so wonderful it makes my heart explode. Similarly, I’m excited to see what folks do on channels like The Nerdist, SB Nation, and TED, if only because it doesn’t really exist in my frame of reference that places like that could get as much support and bandwidth, and that is marvelous.

Not all of these networks will survive, but when they do and don’t, we’ll actually have some sense of what does and doesn’t work, what theoretically untapped audiences do and don’t exist. This is a chance to organize ourselves and show support for the kinds of networks we actually want, with a ratings system that will likely be vastly clearer and simpler than the Nielsen ratings system. And that’s exciting.

And this is also a chance to figure out what a web TV network looks like. Is there 24 hours of content a day? Do networks find existing web series like Husbands and syndicate them? Will the workforces be unionized (the Writers Guild East is working on a campaign for web writers and from what I understand, doing pretty well)? Will the networks become a breeding ground for network pilots, a kind of minor leagues? Or will they develop their own storytelling vernacular, their own sense of timing? I have absolutely no sense of the answers to these questions. But the fact that we’re going to have a well-financed lab to try to figure some of them out is pretty awesome.