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.