The ebb and flow of media companies now suggests smaller, more innovative companies are better business. Is that what current striking TV and film writers want?

Wrap your media calculators around this: overflowing make-goods, weird comparisons for the new live commercial ratings, lower program ratings, and now a strike. Headaches in TV Adland? Oh, yeah -- and see me in 2009.

Walking with a successful TV reality show, a network might be moving sprightly in shiny leather shoes one minute -- and then stumbling over torn bedroom slippers the next. A&E Network certainly is getting its gait altered now that it has suspended the series "Dog The Bounty Hunter" because of Duane "Dog" Chapman's racist remarks, which were published by the National Enquirer.

Apartment building tenants never had it so good -- at least according to cable operators. Now that the FCC has struck down a rule eliminating the exclusivity that cable operators have had for years in distributing TV programming, much will change, say the likes of companies such as Comcast.

What you know is that the immediate effect of a writer's strike will hit all those late-night comedy chatfests -- as well as shows like "Saturday Night Live." What you don't realize is, the collateral damage will also sideswipe late-night marketers.

There goes the neighborhood: CBS Television Distribution, the dominant player in the syndication business, has decided not to attend the annual NATPE syndication conference this year in Las Vegas. In recent years a number of major studios have downgraded their presence at the event. But with CBS this will be a shutout of sorts: no floor, no suites, no CBS executives anywhere at the event -- except for its international TV sales group.

To Jeff Zucker, some Internet platforms just equate to big CPMs, big headlines -- and chump change in terms of overall revenue. That's what the president of NBC Universal told New Yorker writer Ken Auletta on Monday, referring to what Apple's iTunes Music Store brought to the party for his TV shows. Zucker said it amount to just $15 million -- or approximately the craft services fee for "Heroes."

Joke all you want to about MyNetworkTV's microscopic ratings. Then look closer. What local media wouldn't want to be in their TV affiliates' place -- in an extra-hot TV advertising market where those stations don't get a broadcast network's or cable nework's usual number of minutes an hour of advertising time to sell? They get a massive nine minutes -- with MyNetworkTV getting five minutes to sell.

Comcast can float all boats -- cable operators' boats, that is. But when waters get rough those vessels tend to list. And that's what happened yesterday. On the heels of Comcast's stock sinking 10% to a 52-week low, a number of publicly traded cable operators also took on water.

n TV world, it's déclassé for any show to be called a "spin-off." Sounds like a throwaway, of sorts. Not too many TV executives will cop to this usable, but much maligned, TV term. They might use other snooty terms - "product extension" or "line extension." Still, ABC's "Private Practice" seems to be doing nicely -- as a spin-whatever show, about a character that used to be on "Grey's Anatomy."