Hulu’s employees used to be owners, too. But those days are over, so they’re going to have to be happy with a paycheck and some bonuses.

That’s the upshot of a new long-term incentive plan I’m told the video site is prepping. It’s meant to replace the equity stakes Hulu’s employees cashed out earlier this fall. And it should be going into effect soon.

The move is small but symbolic: Hulu used to be a start-up, and the people who worked there had the potential for a big payout if things went really, really well. But investor Providence Equity Partners sold its stake in the site in October, and that let Hulu employees sell too. The company’s value doubled, to $2 billion, in five years, so many of them did do well. But not sit-on-a-beach-and-count-your-money well.

Now, it’s purely a Big Media asset — Hulu is co-owned by Comcast, Disney and News Corp. (which also owns this Web site) — and the employees who stick around will be Big Media employees.

So who’s going to stick around? As always, there is plenty of chatter about CEO Jason Kilar’s next move, but that chatter has been going on for years, and he’s still there.

That said, if someone does present Kilar with a great opportunity — say, the chance to run a start-up that’s already up and running, but that has the potential to get really, really, big — he can now head out without reservation. He has taken the company much further than many expected and has also gotten his team paid.

Some of Kilar’s senior team could head out the door regardless. Both Andy Forssell, who heads up Hulu’s content efforts, and Jean-Paul Colaco, who runs ad sales, are frequently mentioned by people outside the company as candidates for new jobs.

Meanwhile, people who have talked to other Hulu employees say some of them either have new gigs lined up or have begun looking for them. After the cash-out in October, Hulu paid out additional bonuses to get some senior managers and key employees to stick around through the end of 2012. But now those payouts are done as well, so it won’t be surprising if you see an exodus in the new year.

Hulu’s corporate owners seem resigned to that notion, and seem confident that they can hire replacements if necessary. As The Wall Street Journal noted last week, the really big issue for the company is that its corporate owners don’t agree about what they want to do with the site going forward. If News Corp. and Disney can’t figure that out, it doesn’t matter who’s still there to run it.

And as far as everything else: Nada.

In the past, Jason Kilar has used these state of the company reports to make big declarations about The Future Of TV, or at least the near-term future of Hulu, the joint venture between News Corp., Disney and Comcast (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

Today, there’s none of that. Just the numbers, sir.

And maybe, if you’re into tea-leaf-reading, an oblique reference from Kilar: “So much has changed” since the company’s conception in 2007, he notes.

Which might be, among other things, a reference to big changes behind the scenes with Hulu’s corporate owners, who haven’t had a consistent approach to the site in five years. And/or its employees, who have had a “liquidity event” worth roughly $200 million this fall.

Or maybe it was just some he words he typed up and put on a blog. (I know the feeling!)

Back to the numbers: Hulu will do $695 million in revenue this year. That’s up 65 percent from the $420 million it did last year, when revenue was up 60 percent. And that three-million-plus number for Hulu Plus is two times last year’s tally (Hulu competitor Netflix has around 27 million paid subscribers worldwide).

In the past, Hulu has said that it expects subscription dollars to make up more than half of its total revenue. It doesn’t spell that out here, but I believe it’s still the case.

So that’s all good and bow-worthy for the Hulu team. The questions about how it works with its content/partner owners, and who at Hulu will be around to work with them, we can tackle some other time.

What I’ve been testing over the past week is different from that. It’s called Dyle, and it’s a mobile TV service from a group of broadcasters that include the Fox, NBC, Telemundo and ION networks. (Fox, one of the broadcasters in the Dyle group, is owned by News Corp., which is also a parent company of this Web site.)

Dyle turns some mobile devices into mini TVs, ones with an actual TV tuner, so that you can watch local news and a few basic channels on the go the same way you would watch television at home. This TV content is free, and you don’t need a cable subscription for it, though you will need to pay for the hardware that lets you watch it. Unlike streaming video from Web services, Dyle doesn’t use up your cellular data or even require Wi-Fi.

Live TV on mobile has been attempted before — and has received a fuzzy reception in the U.S., figuratively speaking. Qualcomm tried and failed with MediaFLO. A company called Aereo currently offers live TV directly on mobile devices and PCs for a small monthly fee, but it only works in New York City and is currently caught up in a legal battle with TV networks.

In fact, the group behind Dyle has been pushing live mobile TV for a few years now, though its hardware options have been pretty limited.

But, based on my experience with Dyle, I’m still not enthused about this kind of live mobile television.

Dyle doesn’t broadcast in HD, and doesn’t include DVR options. I didn’t have access to more than five channels, and the service was spotty. While Apple mobile users can access Dyle through a $100 accessory made by Elgato, Android users have fewer options. With the exception of the $459 Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G phone through MetroPCS, which has a TV tuner built in, Dyle currently isn’t running on Android devices. Dyle says the group is planning more Android devices with Dyle capabilities in the new year.

While it’s notable that there is now a solution for Apple devices, Dyle just wasn’t compelling enough for me to carry around the Elgato dongle and continue to use the TV service on a regular basis.

I tested Dyle in both New York City and San Francisco, two of the 35 U.S. markets in which it’s currently available. There are a couple of different ways to access Dyle, and the app names can get confusing.

First, there’s the Samsung phone from MetroPCS that I mentioned earlier. It has an extendable TV antenna built into the phone, and a Dyle-branded app comes preinstalled.

Then there’s the accessory from Elgato that works with the iPhone and iPad -– this app is called EyeTV, not Dyle. The dongle, which also has an antenna, plugs directly into the bottom of Apple devices with 30-pin ports. If you have the new iPhone 5 or the iPad mini, you’ll have to use an adapter.

After fully extending the antenna on the Samsung phone or the Elgato dongle, I was ready to watch TV. In New York, I had access to five channels, including NBC, Fox and Telemundo. The programming is framed by a very basic channel guide, which doesn’t offer much additional information beyond the show name. I watched local news in bed one night, and part of an NFL game on EyeTV using my iPhone 4.

In case you’re wondering, you will have to sit through commercials, just as you would with “regular” TV — and, nope, you can’t fast-forward through them.

The picture looked a little bit scrambled at times, and when I changed the size of the video to fit my screen, the audio would sometimes cut out. And the video didn’t fully extend to fit the screen of the regular iPad or iPad mini. Still, compared with my experience in San Francisco, Dyle worked pretty well for me in New York.

On the West Coast, the service was inconsistent. I tested Dyle on the same three devices. On the Samsung phone, I was initially able to pull in five channels: NBC, Fox, My 36, Telemundo and Qubo, a cartoon network. I tuned in to the evening news on Fox, and placed the phone next to my laptop so I could listen to the local news while I was doing work.

At one point, as I was changing channels, the signal cut out for me on the Samsung phone. It later came back, and Dyle TV says there may have been a service outage at that time. But after that I was never able to successfully access all five channels.

On the iPad mini with the Elgato dongle, I was only able to watch the Qubo channel. This was especially disappointing when I woke up one morning and wanted to check out the news on the iPad instead of turning on the TV. All I could watch were cartoons.

Another drawback about Dyle is that you can’t record or store content. So, when I was preparing for a couple flights this week, Dyle wasn’t part of the equation. If I wanted to watch a TV show or movie on my iPad during the flights, I’d have to download the content in advance from another service.

Dyle says that it’s working with more hardware makers to bring the service to all kinds of devices, including more mobile phones, tablets, and even screens in the back seats of cars. The company envisions that it could work as a cable-authentication service, providing a way to let you access your cable service from your mobile phone if you’re paying for a cable subscription.

But, for now, Dyle is just a niche thing for consumers who really like to watch local TV on their phones, and its content is still too limited to make it appealing.

Now it’s a bit of everything: Old and not-so-old TV shows, movies you haven’t heard of, movies you have heard of, and starting next year, TV shows that Netflix is making for itself.

The man in charge of all that is Ted Sarandos, who negotiates all of the Silicon Valley company’s deals with Hollywood. So he’s a perfect guy to bring onstage for our upcoming D: Dive Into Media conference, which is all about the confluence of tech and media.

And appearing onstage alongside Sarandos will be … well, we can’t come out and say who, exactly. (Believe us. We’d like to. And we will! But not today. Hollywood is an odd place.)

But we can tell you that it’s someone intimately involved in Arrested Development, the much-loved Fox comedy series that Netflix is reviving next year.

So that should be fun! And informative, too: Sarandos can explain what it’s like to haggle with partners who can’t figure out if they want to cash your checks, or kill you off, or both. And … person to be named later can explain what it’s like to create a big TV show for a digital-only audience. Among other things!

They’ll join a pretty great cast at the stunning Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on February 11 and 12. Here’s who we’ve told you about so far: Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, Hearst Magazines president David Carey, Google chief business officer Nikesh Arora, Facebook partnership vice president Dan Rose, HBO co-president Eric Kessler, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen, Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith, Intel media head Erik Huggers and Samsung media head David Eun.

More to come! In the meantime, head here to find registration information for the conference. See you soon …

A handful of networks, including Disney and ESPN, will stream shows to your tablet, but you’ll need a cable subscription to make them work.

And if you live in New York City, Aereo will let you watch programming from broadcast networks. But since it isn’t paying the networks for that programming, the networks are suing to shut Aereo down.

So here’s another choice: Dyle, which launches for Apple’s iOS devices today. You’re probably not going to love it.

Dyle is backed by a consortium that includes NBC, Fox* and a lot of broadcast station owners, and it does have some things going for it:

• Dyle is free, for now.
• Dyle doesn’t require Wi-Fi or wireless service, because it’s beamed over the same airwaves the TV stations (still) use to send signals to TV sets. That means you can watch all you want, without worrying about data caps or charges.
• Since Dyle is backed by (some) of the networks and TV stations, there’s no legal gray area: It’s 100 percent legit.

On the other hand:

• You’ll need a $100 adapter — basically a combination antenna and battery — in order to use Dyle on Apple devices.
• Dyle only provides you with a handful of programming choices in the 35 cities it operates in — basically, whatever’s on most NBC and Fox stations, and a smattering of other channels.
• Dyle doesn’t offer any DVR functions, which means you have to watch in real time or not at all. And you can’t fast-forward through commercials.
• One of live TV’s biggest selling points is sports. But a rights blackout means you can’t watch NFL games on Dyle. (That’s the only programming hole, though: An earlier version of the service did let users watch NBC’s Olympics broadcast, and Fox’s World Series games this year.)
• If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to buy an iPad mini because it doesn’t have Retina display, you’re not going to want to come near Dyle, which doesn’t broadcast in anything like HD. The picture looks okay on an iPhone, but by the time the image gets blown up to an iPad-size screen, it’s quite grainy.
• Dyle’s backers can’t promise that the service will remain free after the end of this year. It probably will. But, for whatever reason, they won’t say that out loud.

That’s a lot of hurdles to put in front of a consumer pondering a purchase. So why is Dyle bothering at all?

Dyle’s backers won’t come out and put it this way, but this appears to be a proof-of-concept test instead of a full-fledged product launch (Dyle has already been on the market for a few months, via MetroPCS’s Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G, which comes with a preinstalled app and a built-in antenna).

You can imagine a future where Dyle would make more sense: It would offer TV from all the broadcasters, and the hardware it needs would get built directly into the gadgets themselves; it would also offer features like recording capabilities.

And at that point the Dyle guys could play around with different business models: They could charge a monthly fee for service. Or bundle it for “free” with a cable TV subscription.

But in order to get to that point, the Dyle guys need to prove that there’s demand for what they’re already offering. It’s a tough chicken-and-egg problem, but you can at least give them credit for trying.

*Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site.

So that’s a big deal, right?

Nope, not really.

Shorter version: This is a deal for “library” shows from CBS. Which is another way of saying “old” shows from CBS, like “CSI: Miami” and “really old” shows, like “Star Trek.”

And almost all of them will be on the Hulu Plus subscription service, not the free Hulu.com.

And CBS is getting paid a license fee for this stuff, but isn’t taking an equity stake in the joint venture along with the other broadcasters.

Plus, CBS has already been working with Hulu, via a deal for CW shows like “Gossip Girl.”

Even shorter version: Remember the deal CBS cut with Netflix in 2011? This is basically the same thing.

One new tweak to this deal: The free Hulu site will get a smattering of stuff, all designed to drive eyeballs elsewhere. CBS will rotate through a handful of its old shows on the site as a promotion for Hulu Plus. It will also provide clips from “day-of” episodes of “Entertainment Tonight,” its syndicated infotainment program.

Just as important, the deal extends Hulu’s previous Viacom pact for another two years. That means Hulu and Hulu Plus viewers can keep using the video service to watch Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s nightly shows, two of Hulu’s biggest draws.

The new deal will give Hulu Plus access to some of Nickelodeon’s live-action and animated kids’ shows, like “iCarly,” “Big Time Rush,” and “SpongeBob Squarepants.”

But it doesn’t include sister channel Nick Jr.’s shows, which are targeted at younger kids. That means no “Dora the Explorer” or “Fresh Beat Band.” Some of those titles are licensed to Hulu competitors Amazon and Netflix.

Viacom’s kids’ shows have been a subject of scrutiny over the last year, as their ratings have slipped. Some analysts argue that Viacom and Disney have been sacrificing TV eyeballs by putting those shows online.

The big picture for Hulu is that it still has the ability to pay for premium programming that doesn’t come from its three broadcast TV owners — NBC, Disney and Fox* — and that it’s willing to do so. The Viacom stuff is unlikely to come cheap — in 2011, when Viacom and Hulu announced the first deal, I pegged the price at $40 million to $50 million.

Meanwhile, we’re into October, and Hulu CEO Jason Kilar is still running the company. That means my most recent predictions about his departure — the most recent one was that he would be out in September — was wrong. Just like all the others I’ve made.

Plans for Hulu’s network owners to buy out co-investor Providence Equity Partners’ stake, in the works since last spring, have yet to close, which means Kilar and his co-workers haven’t received big checks from the “liquidity event,” either. Once they do, things could change, but I’ll refrain from crystal ball gazing this time around.

*Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site.

I bounce from video app to video app. A season of “Sherlock” here, some “The X-Files” there, and at some point while watching “Battle Royale” (totally better than “The Hunger Games,” by the way) I look at a clock. I’ve just spent hours staring at a 10-inch screen when there was a 40-inch one directly in front of me.

While planting your face in front of a tiny screen is perfectly acceptable on trans-Atlantic flights, it can be a little odd at home. But if you give yourself over to the tablet, it’s actually a pretty awesome experience. I’m not claiming an iPad beats the big screen, but I will say this: Watching shows and movies on a tablet feels closer to what television viewing should be like in the 21st century than what 21st-century TVs actually deliver.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Don’t want to watch TV on Friday nights? Don’t have a DVR? No problem.

A day after the show airs, you can see it on:
Hulu
ABC.com
ABC’s iPad and iPhone app
And, if you get pay TV, your pay-TV service’s video on demand system.

One place you can’t see it:
Hulu Plus. The $8-a-month subscription service offers only some of the show’s episodes from previous seasons.

To beat that into the ground: If you want to watch “Shark Tank” someplace other than ABC, you have several legal options. Hulu Plus, the service that’s supposed to give its customers more TV programming than the free version it hatched out of two years ago, isn’t one of them.

Why not? Good question. An ABC rep says the company doesn’t have the rights to distribute the show on subscription video services. It says it’s up to Sony, which produces the show, to cut a deal with Hulu. But a Sony rep says ABC does have those rights. (Update: ABC now says the show is unavailable because of  a “business-related decision.”)

The net result is the same: Hulu Plus customers who want to watch the show on the service have to find another way, because of murky licensing issues.

It’s hard to get whipped up about this. As noted above, there are plenty of other ways to watch “Shark Tank.”*

The only people who are out of luck are the ones who wanted to watch the show on an Android phone or tablet (ABC doesn’t make an app for that OS), or for people who don’t have cable and want to watch the show on a device like a connected TV or an Apple TV.

I tried to watch the show via Apple TV on Saturday night. When that didn’t work, I ended up watching via Time Warner Cable. No big deal.**

And the good news is that these weird, inexplicable-to-regular-humans licensing gaps seem to happen less often than they used to, because Hulu (owned by Disney, News Corp., and Comcast***) and its programming partners have gotten better at ironing this stuff out. But they still happen. Another example: Hulu Plus customers can’t watch “The Simpsons” on their phones or TVs. Meanwhile, these rights gaps aren’t limited to Hulu.

The digital media utopia will be when media makers no longer care where or when we watch their stuff, because our eyeballs will be just as valuable on any platform. And we’re getting there! But it’s going to take awhile. If the media guys are lucky, we’ll be patient.

* And it really is quite good. If you’re reading this site, decent odds you’ll like it. It’s VC approved!

** Yup. I’ll own it — I spend my Saturday nights at home, watching reality shows.

*** News Corp. also owns this Web site.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

So, yes. It certainly appears that Jason Kilar will be leaving Hulu soon.

Of course, it has appeared that way for a long time. And he’s still there.

But Variety’s excellent story (registration required), sparked by an internal memo laying out scenarios for the video site’s future, now pegs his likely exit date to September. That’s when a deal to let Kilar and his fellow employees cash out their equity stakes should go into effect.

Once that’s finally done — those wheels have formally been in motion since April, when investor Providence Equity got its own cash-out deal lined up — it’s hard to imagine Kilar staying, though he could if he wanted to.

I’ve asked around, and both on and off the record, sources on all sides say that no one has made any decisions about anything. Which could even be true. We should note that even while this has dragged on, Kilar has never dropped his game face, and in the meantime has rolled out stuff like a cool integration with Apple TV.

But, one day, Franco-style, Kilar will leave. And then we (that is, I) can stop running reports about his imminent departure.

The bigger news in the Variety story is the rest of the stuff in the memo, which is about the future of Hulu itself, regardless of who runs it.

In short, it paints a picture of a site and service that will operate much differently than the one that launched in 2008. Instead of being the Web’s primary place to see TV shows from Fox, NBC, and ABC, Hulu will now be one place among many where you can see some of that stuff. With certain restrictions. (News Corp., which owns Fox, also owns this Web site.)

There are a bunch of reasons for that, but the basic one is that it’s not 2008 anymore. That means Hulu’s owners are no longer as terrified of Google and YouTube as they once were, so it’s less important to them to have a single portal as leverage in negotiations. And Hulu’s owners are most interested in getting cable-carriage fees for their programming, which means they’re much less interested in giving them away for free, without restrictions, on Hulu.

From Variety’s highlighting of the big changes outlined in the memo:

• No more exclusivity for current-season content once restricted to Hulu and the networks’ respective Web sites. Now Disney and News Corp. can turn around and license programming to another third-party, i.e. YouTube, which could dilute Hulu’s competitive advantage in the marketplace.

• No more content parity. ABC.com and Fox.com will be able to hold back certain content to differentiate their own sites from Hulu, which was once entitled to everything on the networks’ sites.

• Exclusive “super-distribution” rights Hulu once retained to syndicate content to third-party sites like Yahoo and AOL would revert back to Disney and News Corp.

Alas, Variety doesn’t publish the memo itself. And the story is oblique about what the document actually is — we don’t know if this is a summary of stuff Hulu’s owners have agreed to do, or are discussing, etc.

But it has been clear for some time that Hulu has been headed in this direction. Its owners are happy to use it as a subscription service, if it generates ancillary revenue for them. But they’re not interested in using it as a free service that competes with their other properties — or, most importantly, one that threatens their ability to get license fees.

That’s a much more constrained vision for Hulu than the one Kilar and company rolled out four years ago. But it’s in lockstep with the rest of Big Media’s current stance about digital video. And it could still be an interesting business for someone to run.

Very unlikely that someone will be Kilar.

Like this: Today Hulu Plus subscribers can finally start using the service on Apple’s Web TV peripheral, via a software update Apple pushed out overnight. So if you’re paying the service’s $8-a-month fee, you can now stream TV shows, movies — along with ads — directly to your flat screen.

This brings Apple’s hardware to parity with other devices like the Roku devices and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, so it’s certainly not a game changer. But there are two interesting notes here:

• Like Apple’s deal with Netflix, Hulu Plus is integrated directly into Apple’s iTunes store, which means that if you aren’t a Hulu Plus subscriber, you can sign up using your iTunes account, and Hulu will bill you via Apple. Presumably this means that, just like it does with Netflix, Apple will keep a portion of Hulu’s monthly fee. And from what I can tell, just like Netflix, Hulu won’t let you use iTunes to sign up for the service via a different Apple device, like an iPad or iPhone — if you’re going that route, you’ll still need to visit to Hulu.com
• Hulu and its owner/content partners (Disney, Comcast, and News Corp., which also owns this Web site) had little choice but to get Hulu Plus onto Apple TV. Because with the new Airplay feature in Apple’s new Mountain Lion update, anyone with an Apple TV can already “mirror” the free Hulu Web service onto their TVs. Not being able to offer the paid service — which has features like a deeper content library and HD streaming — would have been quite vexing for Jason Kilar and company.

Big picture for Apple: Tim Cook refuses to say much about TV other than that Apple is interested in it. But these incremental feature adds give you a pretty good sense of where Cook may be going.

The pay-TV part, though, is going to seem very familiar: They’ll pay Google $120 a month, and they’ll get a bunch of TV channels, whether they want all of them or not.

Which isn’t to say it won’t be cool. The TV service should offer a bunch of nifty features that will make it easier to find and watch what you want.* And it comes with a free Nexus 7 tablet. And unlike the cable box you have now, it should get better with some frequency, via software updates. Etc.**

But if you were hoping that Google was going to use its fiber project to reorder the TV landscape, you’re going to be disappointed. At least in this incarnation, Google is playing by the TV establishment’s rules.

That is, if you want to get stuff from the cable guys, you have to buy everything they bundle. Discovery’s TLC comes with Animal Planet and the Science Channel. NBCUniversal’s CNBC comes with Bravo, Oxygen and the USA Network. Etc.

And the cable guys are happy to sell Google their shows, because they love having more buyers for their stuff, as long as they don’t break the bundle model they love so much.

Just like they were happy to sell TV to the satellite guys and telco guys. “We view them the way we view [Verizon’s] Fios,” says one programmer who’s working with Google.

Not everyone is in, yet. Time Warner (TNT, TBS, HBO), Disney (ESPN, Disney Channel), News Corp. (Fox News, FX) and AMC Networks (AMC, IFC) don’t have deals with Google. And if Google launches without all of them, the service will look crippled. But the Google folks are saying positive things about getting deals done, and I’ve heard similar murmurs from some of the TV guys.

One exception to the happy talk: News Corp., which owns this Web site, has butted heads with Google repeatedly. The two sides had a particularly unsuccessful discussion about Google TV at CES in January, which led to a Twitter outburst from Rupert Murdoch. So that deal could be extra-hard to nail down.

Then again, Viacom also has problems with Google — you may recall they are still suing them over YouTube. And Viacom has signed on for Google Fiber, too.***

Money solves all sorts of problems, especially when it comes with a promise not to screw up the ecosystem that makes the cable guys fat and happy. Right now, Google’s willing to offer both.

*A lot of these features, by the way, are similar to features Google has been showing off with its latest version of its Google TV software. But this being Google, the Google Fiber service is completely separate from Google TV — they’re handled by different teams, using different hardware, different software. So odd. So Googley.

**You can watch the Google guys pitch this themselves, by checking out yesterday’s demo video, starting at the 25-minute mark.

***Boy, did this dummy get that one wrong. Sorry!

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/BortN66)

That’s all old news now: All the big media companies that took hits yesterday — Comcast, Viacom, Disney, etc. — are trading back where they were on Wednesday, before Barry Diller and his Web video start-up won a legal victory.

So which group got it right? The sky-is-kinda-falling folks who sold media stocks yesterday morning? Or the “What, me worry?” camp that bought them up yesterday afternoon and today?

Insert professional shrug here. The big-TV versus Aereo case is just starting — this week’s ruling was simply a decision not to shut the company down while the trial moves on — and is likely to drag on for years.

Investors don’t like uncertainity, but they’re kind of okay with uncertainity that won’t affect the near-term future. So that’s probably the best explanation for keeping things status quo, share-price-wise.

But just for giggles, let’s pretend that Aereo ends up definitively winning its legal argument: That it can sell access to broadcast-TV programming without paying broadcasters.

What then? Here’s how it might break down for different parts of the Big TV Industrial Complex:

Broadcasters: These guys have the most to lose. In recent years, big over-the-air broadcasters have been able to secure big “retransmission” fees from the cable companies for their stuff — CBS, for instance, has said it should pocket $250 million in retrans fees this year, and that it could end up pocketing as much as $700 million a year a few years from now.

And if Aereo doesn’t need to pay broadcasters to show that stuff, then maybe pay-TV providers like Time Warner Cable and Verizon don’t have to, either. Broadcasters still make most of their money from selling ads, and that business doesn’t have to disappear if viewers head to Aereo or other “over the top” alternatives.

But just like the fees that Netflix and other digital outlets have started paying Big Media companies, retrans fees are extra valuable to the broadcasters because they’re almost 100 percent pure profit.

Cable programmers: Their core business doesn’t get affected, because there’s no way for Aereo to get its hands on stuff like ESPN or Bravo without paying for it.

There is a possibility that Aereo’s customers are happy to just get programming from the four big broadcast networks, and add in a few shows here and there from iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, etc. And if that happens, that’s not good for cable programmers, since it could accelerate cord-cutting.

But it’s just as likely that Aereo ends up striking deals with the cable networks, so it can sell its customers a more complete package, becoming a virtual pay-TV provider itself. And the cable guys would be just fine with that — as long as Aereo agrees to buy bundles.

Pay-TV providers: The negative scenario is one where Aereo attracts lots of subscribers for a broadcast-only package of programming, and many of those customers stop paying the likes of Comcast and Verizon for TV.

But even if that happens, they’ll still end up paying the likes of Comcast and Verizon for broadband. And that’s not a terrible scenario for those guys at all, since broadband margins are much better than video-service margins. And again, if Aereo doesn’t have to pay for broadcast TV, then the pay-TV guys could make the same argument themselves — which is what Time Warner Cable boss Glenn Britt has already been publicly musing about.

Now, let’s make it even more complex: All of the big media companies are in multiple lines of business, which makes it even harder to assess their impact.

Three of the Big Four broadcasters, for instance, are owned by companies with big cable programming businesses, which reduces the hit they might take (it may also give them the option to move some programming from broadcast channels to cable channels, as Disney did when it moved “Monday Night Football” from ABC to ESPN).

And Comcast is a broadcaster, a cable programmer and a cable provider. What does Aereo mean for it?

So it’s easy to see why Barry Diller is betting on Aereo: If it works, it could change the way money flows in the TV business, and he could be in a position to pocket some of the flow himself.

But that doesn’t mean Aereo will fundamentally disrupt the TV business. Or at least that’s what Wall Street seems to think today.