This month, two sci-fi themed shows end. Battlestar Galactica ends its entire series, and Star Wars: the Clone Wars, an animated series independently produced by LucasFilm and running on Cartoon Network and TNT, ends its first season.

Clone Wars is a great show, and I can watch it on any sized screen. I’ve tried to get into Galactica on a small screen…not the same. It’s gotta be on TV to work. And it’s a good thing, too, or the show might not have made it THIS long. NBC Universal’s CEO Jeff Zucker once said of internet TV ventures “Our challenge with all these ventures is to effectively monetize them so that we do not end up trading analog dollars for digital pennies”, and that is a serious concern for NBC.

But the future of internet television, or whatever we end up calling it, is so not about NBC it’s not even funny.

When the economy went south, we started to see a lot of things revealed. One of the most important was that just as we suspected, people had C-level gigs at websites that had no passion for the web, would not use the product or service their company provided or produced if they didn’t work there, and followed whatever trend was brought up at whatever conference had the highest attendance.

The companies in this space that will survive are companies with passionate people in the center seat who can get out and literally steer the ship themselves if need be.

Hulu.com, which NBC and Fox own, made $70 million in advertising revenue in it’s first year of operation. YouTube made $100 million last year. That’s impressive, but when you’re a network that makes 4 billion a year, it’s just change.

The “digital pennies” (or “dimes” now) being generated for web television are not enough for networks. They are not enough for divisions of large corporations. But they ARE enough to validate internet distribution. Internet TV is the stuff of true web entrepreneurship. Internet TV is the new pirate radio. The evolution of guerrilla film making. We are supposed to be challenging the system. Networks are supposed to be learning from us. We’re supposed to be developing entire new ways of cost effective production. Telling cutting edge stories. Or at least, telling different stories. Millions of people are not supposed to be tuned in to a show with movie stars in it. Underground comedy shows should not be brought to us by major networks. We’re supposed to have to dig to find obscure shows. Progressive internet TV is not red carpet coverage of the Oscars. It is, in fact, a straight up challenge to Sundance. To be honest? It’s not even that. It’s full coverage of SLAMDANCE. This is what is supposed to make it interesting for advertisers. They’re supposed to want to be a part of this because it’s something you can’t see anywhere else. Not a version of the thing you can see everywhere else. We all have a way to go.

It’s totally not about millions of page views. It’s about a true dedicated audience. You can buy traffic, but you cannot buy an audience. You have to earn it. Slowly. This should impact how we buy and use search, display, and email marketing. It will also impact how we see our users. If we stop seeing them as ways to get our numbers up and see them as people who are genuinely interested in what we’re saying, we’ll have a better understanding of our own brands.

But this is something that only works when you’re independent. If you have to report back to CBS, you can’t talk quality of audience.

Hollywood employs a “first weekend” model. If a movie doesn’t make a bunch of money in 3 weeks, it’s gone. On the internet…there’s no “gone”. So all the front loading and unbalanced marketing is really a waste.

We have to stop treating online media, and especially internet video, like it’s TV.

It’s not supposed to be.