said by UncleDirtNap:The are five major companies that produce the vast majority of the content currently on TV/CATV/SATV and they earn 60% of their revenue from CATV and SATV customer bills. It's simply a fact and ad revenue makes up a very small portion of their overall revenue.
If that were true, WHY subject people to ads at all?
Certainly they could EXTRACT higher CATV fees if it was totally ad free.
CATV pays SOME of the production cost, and Some of the money CATV earns is from advertisers for inserted ads, that is shows are designed with a couple of blank spaces for the local station or cable provider to place ads they sold which was to help defray the local costs of broadcast or running the local cable plant.
the show itself is paid for by the network that orders episodes based on selling the remaining ad spaces.
certainly you can remember when a show or an actor did something controvertial which caused a sponser to with draw, sometimes killing an otherwise popular show in the process.
the content producer gets money from the network, from advertisers (for product placements), and if sucessful, reruns and DVD's, streaming fees, etc.
It takes ALL those things to make it a big financial sucess.
But it starts advertisers will to pay the networks and the network willing to buy shows quite a few of which will not last beyong a pilot plus 8 (about the minmum order for 1/2 hours because startup costs are so high) and it takes a network ad buy to get anything started.
The reason you only see five major companies at the top end is the networks won't throw money at a small company on their own, fearing they won't have the money or other resources to complete a project on time.