Tempest in a you tube

While Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, sees "late night as the next land of opportunity," (“Conan O’Brien Flips Channels, Lands at TBS" WSJ 4/13), Google and YouTube see “the living room as strategically important terrain” ("YouTube Wants You to Sit and Stay Awhile [sic]" NYT 5/30). All this sounds almost reminiscent of colonial times when "They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got" (Heart of Darkness). But what is to be got? Younger viewers since, according to the Wall Street Journal, "TBS's pitch to Mr. O'Brien focused on its younger average audience than the broadcast networks," which should read, "TBS focused on its audience, on average younger than the broadcast networks' (audience)."
So far, the average user spends five hours daily in front of the tube. In comparison, YouTube looks like the pauper beside the prince with only 15 minutes per day. To change this, The New York Times reports, YouTube is “looking at how to push users into passive-consumptive mode” by offering “long-form content” such as movies, shows and webisodes (which must be the equivalent of a series, maybe How I Met Your Mother Online? ). However, Randall Stross of the NYT finds ”an embarrassingly visible portion [of the selection] to be of a type that fails to be even entertainingly bad.” Stross backs up his judgment with critic Joe Queenan of The Guardian who inventoried (meaning he took inventory of) YouTube’s offers and concluded that “All sounds great. But they are not great. Not, not, not.” If they are not great, then they cannot have failed to be entertainingly bad, can they? They obviously failed to be entertainingly good. But why should they? After all, “One of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy” (David Foster Wallace).