The success of your product on TV might just depend on the success of your marketing skills. Not always, but sometimes. Joel Ewanick, chief marketing officer of General Motors, was let go over the weekend. Many factors -- including a specific problem about not vetting a certain European soccer sponsorship - have been cited as the reason, Stateside, one recent point of contention that may stick out could be General Motors' hardline stance on the U.S. TV upfront marketplace.

What happened to appointment television? Some say your DVR, laptop, and tablet now make all the appointments. But Paul Lee, president of ABC Entertainment, says appointment television is still important at his network, especially with its soaps and its continuous weeks of original episodes of shows like "Revenge," "Once Upon A Time" and the still-big "Grey's Anatomy."

Yet again Google is coming to the TV distribution market. But wait....Not yet. Google plans to be a real TV network and Internet/broadband retailer with its IPTV-like distribution service. But you may only be hearing the faint sound of a car's engine here.

Is the CW darker, more seductive, and perhaps more adult? That's what a new brand campaign and image for the young-skewing broadcast network seems to be about. The campaign, called "TV Now," aims to bring more young people to the CW airwaves and other media destinations. Begining next month, the campaign offers a set of new TV-wise adjectives -- "seducTV," "suggesTV," "prescripTV" and "provocaTV."

Have TV viewers now become so used to blackouts that they'll just shrug their shoulders? In the 1950s, if antenna problems caused "snow" on your black-and-white screen, you probably got frustrated. But you likely got somewhat used to it -- in an apathetic way. Nine days of a blackout of Viacom channels on DirecTV didn't harm the two companies as much as one might think. One survey pointed out that during those nine days, only 4% of DirecTV subscribers canceled their subscriptions.

PBS says it is in danger of going away -- a move that isn't all about the obvious potential stripping of government support. PBS President/Chief Executive Officer Paula Kerger says only 15% of the network's overall funds come directly from the federal government. The vast majority comes from donations, both big and small. To a lesser degree, PBS also gets money from advertisers, called "sponsorships."

NBA owners have voted to break new advertising ground by approving messaging on team uniforms, which could bring in $125 million a year. To be fair, this isn't near the billions of dollars the NBA grabs in TV and other advertising revenues.

The TV upfront business came in more or less as predicted, with modest price increases for national players. Now comes the usual next mystery: Whither the scatter markets?

Advertisers aren't all that upset with Dish Network, the maker of a more efficient system to skip commercials called AutoHop. While TV networks are legally trying to get Dish to back off from AutoHop, the networks' advertising clients are still doing addressable advertising trials with the satellite programming company.

HBO's "The Newsroom" makes the case that Congress blew it at the dawn of the TV age when it came to the use of "public airwaves." That's when it was proposed that, since media companies had the ability to make millions of dollars from using the public airwaves, those companies should give up one hour of daily programming for an advertising-free newscast.