I honestly feel like a broken record (or scratched CD or corrupted file) these days... between telling my son not to poke his sister, and explaining to clients that YouTube views are not the equivalent of Nielsen ratings, I feel I have reached the tipping point. Now comes this article in the Times today, "Ad Growth for AOL Called Vital to a Remake," and I feel like no one has been listening to the loud booming voice of history.

Coming off a summer with stand-out series, viewer expectations for the broadcast network fall season are high. But most critics have been especially cautious in forecasting new season successes. The competition for viewers is more intense than ever; last year, the five broadcast networks lost nearly 10% of their audiences. This year, unless the networks are able to launch several new hits, there will almost inevitably be further erosion. Here's a look at those that generated big pre-season buzz.

In some recent posts, I focused on the potential dislocation that will occur in U.S. TV usage as a result of the federally mandated conversion to digital broadcast spectrum on Feb. 17, 2009. We even added a countdown clock to the TV Board home page to serve as a constant reminder of days, hours, minutes and seconds ticking off, as much of the TV industry appears to be sitting idly by. I also coined a goofy shorthand code -- Y2K+9.13 (the year 2000 plus nine years and 48 days until Feb. 17, 2009) -- to suggest that the transition has …

I'm taking a few days off this week. Part of this strenuous involves catching up on some of the content on my DVR that has been patiently waiting for me. I also found myself thinking of the advertising that still resonates with me from when I first saw it back in the mists of time as a callow youth in the UK. The title of the piece is one such example -- not only a great ad for Pepsi, but something that entered the language (or at least our attempts at it did) and the culture at a time when …

There are a couple of key issues on the table that our regulatory agencies are presently scrutinizing which will affect how U.S. citizens fare with their media options in the coming years. Top priorities, in my opinion, would probably focus on the 2009 broadcast transition from analog to digital. Yet consider all of the other things that the Federal Communications Commission has up in the air -- no pun intended.

Filling in today for my good friend Lydia (life with a four-week-old sometimes gets in the way of regular essay writing) gives me an opportunity to pontificate on the significance of Time Warner Cable's newly announced Look Back service, which it will be launching with a slow rollout starting in October. Look Back, a free digital cable feature, will enable viewers to watch any show (in theory) at any time after it has aired, on the day it's on.So, if you miss "Lost" on Wednesday at 10 p.m., you can catch it at 11, but by midnight you're out of …

YouTube, with millions of single-click unlinked video fragments, is not the future of broadband entertainment. ITunes, with a closed business model focused exclusively on selling iPods, is also not the future. The future, says Podshow CEO Ron Bloom and his partner, original MTV VJ Adam Curry, is "serialized episodic content that bridges the gap between TV networks and YouTube. On-demand content delivered fresh to audiences who are waiting for it is the new model."

The bad news is that consumer time spent with media is down. It's down for the first time in recent memory -- despite an explosion of media options. The good news within that, according to the media economists at Veronis Suhler Stevenson, is that media time is down because digital media is enabling consumers to spend it more efficiently.

Early in the emergence of the Internet and the computer as a home accessory, the concept of the Digital Divide was coined to define a growing concern that developed markets would end up with an electronically disenfranchised underbelly -- a portion of the population without access to the Web and all it offered. But the Digital Divide is not only economically driven. There are attitudinal factors that also come into play. And now it's interesting to think how the divide may apply to the DVR.

Since I began writing for TV Board this past January, I've always pegged the U.S. TV ad spend at approximately $60 billion and online ad revenue at nearly $17 billion - with 44+% heading in the direction of search, and somewhere around a $775 million (2007) from broadband video. I have been out proselytizing -- without picking up any acolytes, to my knowledge - to have our industry categorize all video viewing as television - just the way Webster translated it eons ago: "the transmission of video images" - so that revenue would be more equitably spread among the new …