There’s a great piece in this month’s Atlantic Monthly (a magazine I’d forgotten how much I liked) by Michael Hirschorn about the eventual evolution of television.

(And it’s hard not to like an article that starts out, “One of the most exhausting things about new-media Moonies is their cultish conviction: either you “get it” or you don’t.”)

Hirschorn focuses on how, due the unsatisfactory experience currently offered by web video, TV actually has an opportunity to develop a model that’s different from the ones that’s more or less been forced on the music and newspaper industries, which Hirschorn (correctly) notes have “swiftly turn(ed) from a business to a charity.”

He also makes the valid point that television is currently more interactive than web video:

Watching video on the Web, contra-trend, remains more of an analog experience than watching it on TV. On TV, you can click through hundreds of offerings instantly, or choose from dozens more you’ve recorded on your digital video recorder, and there’s a handy electronic program guide to tell you what’s on and when. On most Web video sites, however, clicking from show to show involves launching and relaunching players and then sitting through seemingly interminable “pre-roll” ads (and it’s almost always the same ad). The quality remains subpar, with poor definition, small player windows, and unsynced audio and video. The selection is spotty, and there is no central guide to what is available where and when.

While Hirschorn envisions TV morphing into a sort of on-demand website with both amateur and professionally produced content, sort of a mash-up of YouTube and NBC (a vision that’s not particularly novel) he doesn’t offer many suggestions on the $64 million question: how best to monetize it.

One option he does discuss is for providers to simply charge more for combined TV/internet service, since, as he notes, paying more for a more robust offering may prove an appealing option, especially now that people have gotten accustomed to cable providers “triple play” packages (cable, phone and internet bundled together.)

An alternative option, one that I see as being more viable would be a two-tier system where we’d pay a fixed amount to watch a show (or a network) without commercials versus watching it for free with commercials. The trick, of course, would be to find an amount that allows networks (and movie studios) to earn the kind of profits that enables them to make the sort of high production quality programming we’ve become used to. For as Hirschorn notes:

The post–World War II model of expensive video driving a massively profitable content-production industry (that now-legendary $10 million pilot for Lost, those $200 million movies) is in some peril…

Given the massive profits networks are accustomed to, that model may be tough to come by; NBC President Jeff Zucker pulled his networks shows off of iTunes saying “We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side.”

Hirschorn probably gives too much play to the notion of viewers wanting to be able to manipulate and share content. Manipulating content, as anyone who’s tried to edit footage from their kids birthday party on iMovie knows, is a time-consuming venture and the result is personal enough to make it akin to writing a song or a poem: in other words it’s not going to have all that much mass appeal. Ditto sharing actual content vs. sharing links to that content: In a world where everything is readily available “on demand,” I’m much more likely to send an email telling a friend to watch a particular show than I am to send “that Gossip Girl clip” I just watched.

Regardless, the future of television is something that greatly affects the entire advertising and marketing community, no matter what area we’re working in. For as Hirschorn notes, it all boils down to whether the TV/Interweb hybrid will

(B)e more like TV, plus interactivity; or more like the Internet, plus TV? The distinction will be worth billions to whoever gets there first and organizes this mess in a fashion that’s satisfying for consumers.