• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, November 1, 2006

All TV distribution is good--and growing. No one wins the day. It's one for all, and all for one.

Look at stock performances of traditional phone companies like BellSouth and AT&T, as well as cable companies like Comcast, who are seeing their respective stocks grown by over 50%.  Despite hot competition between the two industries to offer packages of voice, video or data, all are growing.

One would expect, in our limited TV drama mindset, that cable, phone or even satellite distribution would become the dominant players. But that scenario isn't reading like the script should.

"People think it's black and white, but there's really a mix of products as we move away from older technology," Richard C. Notebaert, chief executive of Qwest, whose shares are up 53 percent this year, told The New York Times.

Typically we're used to crowning winners--or at least predicting winners.  In the 1990s, the cable industry sold the story that broadcast networks and the older technology were dying. The way the story was told, it was hard to expect that network TV would even exist in 2000.

Then came along, "Survivor," "American Idol," and "Desperate Housewives."  If network TV was dying, why did a new generation, who grew up with cable and was seemingly TV-agnostic when it came to distribution, still find network television alluring?  But it still had strong distribution, and was ready to spend the big bucks in production and marketing.

Both cable and network have survived and grown. Now, listening to major cable research executives, they speak in a different tone these days: Not only is cable growing, but TV viewing as a whole is growing.

All that could be because many cable networks have parent media companies that have financial interests and/or ownership of traditional broadcast networks or television stations. But more than that, there is a holistic TV realization to the marketplace.

In the early '90s, executives would predict that with cable growing and networks sinking, all TV programs would have a 5 rating someday.  A decade and a half later, that still hasn't happened.

Maybe those numbers should be revised to say that every TV show someday will have a 1 rating, whether on network, cable, or mobile devices. 

But don't worry about actual ratings. Advertisers will spend more money (including on the Internet) to reach these scattered and harder-to-find viewers--just like they always have. Viewers are spending more, too, on new technologies.

Everybody wins--mostly. In the TV boxing ring, everyone gets to share the championship belt. But someone has to carry the spit bucket.