Southern Californians were shocked last week when public TV station KCET announced it would not renew its affiliation with PBS. It is without question that other PBS affiliates will be facing similar budget constraints, making the KCET incident a potential precursor to the sea change in distribution methods that lies ahead. For PBS, this multimillion-dollar hit could be a blessing in disguise, forcing the company to more seriously explore alternatives methods to reach their audience -- namely, their lagging digital initiatives. The Internet is, after all, the publishing and broadcasting beacon of free public thought and enterprise.

The multiplatform experience is, in my humble opinion, one of the main reasons why many shows are so successful in gaining and retaining an audience. These shows are woven into the media-hungry fabric of our society. Anything and everything viewers want to know about the background of the shows, character back stories, etc., is all right there at our fingertips and splattered across every media. There's infinite content to search, explore, and consume on the Internet, mobile phone, iPad, etc.

As a veteran of the online video advertising business, it's become harder and harder for me to imagine what it must be like to not be hyper-aware of every piece of ad content I'm served online. I can't help it. I know too much. To beat my "insider's" handicap, I've found a good way to make sure to stay grounded; I force myself to understand data on reach and engagement as they relate to real-life situations. After all, behind all of these success metrics and engagement data lies the age-old question inherent in all forms of advertising: What affects buying …

Unfortunately, blogging has almost become a cliché. Even television news programs sometimes try to show how up-to-date they are by sharing comments from popular blogs. Typically, they pick the least creative ones such as Huffington Post, Politico, and Daily Kos. Nonetheless, much like the printing press transformed publishing, the true cultural significance of blogging -- which is only incipient at present -- will be a consequence of its production process.

In general, traditional media possess size but lack speed; start-ups possess speed but lack size. In online video, traditional media first sought to build instead of buy, while start-ups sought to become the Google of video. By now it's clear that apart from Hulu, the build approach has generally failed for big media (and Hulu only really proved that content is king). Meanwhile, for start-ups, the company most likely to become the Google of video is Google -- by way of owning YouTube, which accounts for 44% of video views in the U.S.

Recently I heard the head of digital at a major agency lament the fact that although his company was one of the first to adopt dynamic ads years ago, they have executed only a handful of campaigns. Creative production and operational complexity are real issues for the agency. Shortly thereafter, I spoke to a major online publisher who is spearheading new advertising solutions by combining audience insights with dynamic creative. However, their efforts are the exception rather than the rule, while thousands of advertisers still struggle with the idea that every online display campaign should be dynamic and are overwhelmed …

My good friend Tod Sacerdoti posted a provocative article last week titled "Mobile Video Advertising Is Irrelevant," making the argument, and I'm paraphrasing, that video is video no matter where and on what screen that video is viewed on. This is a subject we've thought a lot about as you can imagine, and I wanted to point out that he is wrong for one big reason: specificity works.

f you watch a music video three times in a row and can't remember a lyric or chorus, there must be another reason you're wasting time at work. Such is the case with White Knuckles, the latest video from the band OK Go.

I feel strongly that mobile video advertising is fundamentally irrelevant and will eventually be removed from the pool of industry jargon. What makes me think this? Mobile video is irrelevant because the medium doesn't change anything about our ability to offer scale, targeting, optimization or performance media to our advertisers. In addition, mobile video advertising is served in a nearly identical way to online video (i.e., a forced view before the consumption of free content), so the experience of viewing the ad doesn't change the way it's consumed or performs.

In his Archive of American Television interview back in 1997, Hugh Downs, who got his start in radio, said this of TV's first years: "I thought it was a gimmick like 3-D movies and it would just go away... I saw in a relatively short time that it was here to stay, and that I'd better move toward participating in it." There is a similar conflict happening now between the established medium of television and original Web content.