• by Joe Mandese , March 1, 2011

So who's going to pay for the all that high-end, scripted programming – you know, the kind we've been watching on TV for more than half a century – if it goes over-the-top to viewers who can bypass traditional advertising message that historically have underwritten it?

That was the question that MPG Televisual chief Mitch Oscar asked during the opening panel at OMMA Global in San Francisco.

Oscar, citing his own teenage son's Xbox-based video streaming behavior noted that he is a lot like other young viewers who are watching long-form content without ads.

Of course, we all think of ad-supported television as an implicit "contract with the consumer," but Oscar suggested it's actually far more fundamental than that.

"I think the Tea Party supports advertising," Oscar quipped. "It's a constitutional right."