eyeballs are screen agnostic (monetizing p2p television).

I'm consistently baffled about why pirating TV online is an issue.  Let's look at this logically:

1. TV is paid for (in part) with advertising sales.
2. Advertising is a matter of eyeballs, and metrics.  The number of people watching, and other demographic info, determines the price of advertising time, with past results dictating future pricing.
3. Piracy is fast, wide distribution, usually at no cost to the uploader of content.
4. The simplest option, with the minimum intrusiveness, usually wins.

If those four things are true (and I believe they are), I will never understand why television programs aren't distributed online, at time of broadcast, from the networks that broadcast them traditionally.

Eyeballs are eyeballs regardless of what screen they are focused on.  Whether I'm watching a show on a TV, a monitor, or an iPod, I'm still watching.  When I watch a program on my iPod, it normally doesn't have commercials; but only because I'm either paying for it, or it has been uploaded without commercials.  

If the first place to get a TV show I wanted to watch was from the broadcasting network, with commercials, I would get it there.  No questions asked.  Because the time saved in downloading something at 8pm from NBC rather than at 11pm from EZTV is worth a few minutes of commercials to me.  I would wager it would be the same way for others, provided the download was in an open format, with no copy protection.  This would be a product that competes with piracy, using the tools the content owners actually have: initial release date (usually), and best quality (almost always).

The interesting thing, is that there is a potential for a wider market of advertisers.  If google analytics can tell me which country my readers are coming from, it can probably tell CBS which country a visitor is trying to download How I Met Your Mother from.  Why can't there be dozens of versions of each show, each with localized commercials in the same break period?  Why can't online distribution mean that the same ad space can be sold to different companies in Canada, the US, and Uruguay?  It happens when signals are rebroadcast over TV, why not do the same online.

Instead of complaining about the internet stealing eyeballs, why not sell access to those eyeballs too?  Why not do the whole thing via bittorrent, at next to no cost?  Why not use the torrent download information from each localized version, and use that to justify ad prices?

The short version of why is because you're leaving money on the table, and because you won't stop piracy unless you give customers a better product than piracy does.  If you want to keep selling high quality versions without commercials, there will still be customers.  People will always be willing to pay for a premium version, or for a physical copy (DVD).  Monetizing content online can't be based on the idea that you can change behaviour, only that you can create a system that isolates value in that behaviour.  So get on it, despite the complications of clearing content in different countries.

Because the shortest version of 'Why?' is a desperate need to stay relevant.

[To point out: 1) Yes, I am aware that people can skip past ads in downloaded content.  They can also leave the room to get a drink, and often do.  No one uses this as an excuse to stop advertising on TV.  2) People could just burn DVD copies of the torrented shows.  People already do.  Buying a DVD is usually about convenience, quality, love of the content and special features.  3) There are probably technological issues with this.  I understand that, and this is why there are people smarter than me to make it work regardless.]