On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

The Hulu CEO insists that his “Hulu Plus” service, which gives subscribers a deep catalog of shows they can watch on their computers or on gadgets like the iPad, isn’t meant to replace cable. Instead, he says, it’s meant to augment cable. Just like your iPhone doesn’t replace your PC.

And he’s right. Hulu Plus is designed explicitly not to threaten the cable business. That’s why it doesn’t offer any news or sports, and why it only offers shows that air on three broadcast networks and almost nothing that runs on cable networks.

To spell it out: Hulu’s network owners–GE’s (GE) NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Disney’s (DIS) ABC–all have corporate cable siblings, and they all make lots of money from cable subscription fees. (And the broadcasters themselves are trying to get the cable guys to pay them for their stuff, too.) So they have no interest in upsetting the likes of Comcast (CMCSA) by creating a real cable competitor.

Doesn’t matter what Kilar says, argue the Web TV optimists/cable cynics. They believe that sooner or later the content guys will want to break free from the cable guys and go “over the top”–by selling their stuff directly to consumers or via rival middlemen like Hulu or perhaps Apple (AAPL).

One day, maybe. But right now the TV industry continues to work very well for its biggest players. A hint of the dollars involved: Yesterday, news broke that Fox, which makes “Modern Family” for ABC, has sold reruns to NBC Universal’s USA network for $1.5 million per episode. USA of course, will pay for the programming with dollars it extracts from cable operators.

Think anyone involved in the above scenario wants to shake things up anytime soon?

I talked with Kilar yesterday about Hulu Plus and its place in the TV ecosystem. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our chat:

You’ve been working on putting this service together for more than a year. What took so long?

At a macro level, it’s balancing the needs of consumers, advertisers and content owners. And if you talk to any one of those three customer sets in isolation, often times you won’t delight the other two. So the hurdle we faced with Hulu Plus was, how can we thread this needle in a way that delights all three customer sets?

Hulu Plus will cost $10 a month, but will still feature ads. Haven’t Web users been conditioned to expect ads with free stuff, but not with stuff they pay for?

I don’t think that’s [the case]. We’ve done so much research about this, in terms of talking to thousands and thousands of people about the service, in obviously confidential ways that mask the brand name behind this…The vast majority of consumers actually pay for premium content through subscription and get advertising. And by that I’m referring to [cable TV, in the] living room environment. Which is where most of the consumption happens these days.

What we found in our research is that there isn’t this sort of belief of “If I’m paying for this, I must have no ads.” What [we asked] consumers was, “If you had a choice between having it be with no ads and at a higher price, [versus] having it with a relatively modest level of advertising but lower priced, which would you prefer?” They dramatically chose, in large numbers, the latter.

There’s no reason why we couldn’t offer an ad-free version of this. It just would be at a higher price.

There doesn’t seem to be any programming here from cable TV networks. That’s not a coincidence, right?

It’s a broadcast-focused service.

But how do you explain that to customers, who don’t distinguish between broadcast and cable TV–they just know they like TV shows?

When we launched Hulu, everybody was saying, “Oh, this is going to be a substitute for pay TV in the living room.” And I think people may say the same thing here. But it would be wrong. Because when you look at what is in the service versus what is not in the service, it very much is akin to a smartphone relative to a laptop.

The cable and satellite pay TV services have linear, live windows, which are different from the windows that we have in the service. There’s sports, there’s news, there’s cable…this is something different. I believe that as you see this play out, this is something that’s going to be incremental and complimentary to your cable and satellite service. And it’s priced that way.

So this is explicitly not something that should appeal to potential cord-cutters?

I don’t see this as a substitute for cable or satellite service. It’s not a product that can serve that need.

But it could it become that, one day?

I think the relationship between cable and satellite and telco pay TV service providers, and the content industry is a very, very solid one. And I think that is going to persist for quite a long time.

You’ve been able to get Funny or Die clips on YouTube before, of course, but only with some effort–until now, the site has tried to keep views on its site or with its proprietary player.

That only worked in limited doses, though, so it makes plenty of sense for the site to expose its videos to a much larger audience. But note that even Funny or Die is trying to preserve a “windowed” approach to video distribution: Its clips will still premiere on the Funny or Die site before moving over to its YouTube channel.

This isn’t nearly as important as deals Google’s (GOOG) site has already struck with providers like CBS (CBS), Disney (DIS), Time Warner’s (TWX) Turner, and Sony (SNE).

But it does provide me with a chance to run a YouTube clip featuring Will Ferrell. Warning–Mark Wahlberg drops a couple F-bombs in the last 30 seconds of this one:

Part of the magic trick will involve cutting costs. That’s hard to see play out in real time, except when we get flare-ups like YouTube’s fight with Warner Music Group (WMG) over new contract terms. The other part of the abracadabra–selling more ads on more videos, particularly “viral” hits–is easier to spot, particularly because YouTube keeps pointing it out.

For instance: Yesterday’s announcement that the site would start attaching ads to many more popular videos submitted by users and share the proceeds with the uploaders.

YouTube was typically vague about how the plan will work, but the most telling news is that it thinks it can increase the number of “partners” it shares ad revenue with from “thousands” to “tens of thousands.”

Translation: All those skateboarding dog videos you make fun of? We’re going to turn them into money machines. Just watch!

I’m going to make an educated guess and posit that for all the effort YouTube has made  to “monetize”–I hate that word, but what can you do?–its gazillions of videos, its most important revenue generator is still its homepage. YouTube’s competitors think a one-day “takeover” there may cost an advertiser as much as $500,000.

There’s not a whole lot of upside left for YouTube in the homepage, though. It’s the gateway to the world’s biggest video site, and the second-biggest search engine, and you either want to advertise on it or you don’t.

But the rest of site remains a big opportunity. YouTube can keep chasing splashy “premium content” deals like the ones it has struck with Sony (SNE), Disney (DIS) and Time Warner (TWX). And at the same time, it can try selling more of the “long tail”–basically, everything that isn’t “premium.”

YouTube’s long-tail efforts sometimes get ignored, especially when the site is compared to Hulu and its array of TV shows and movies. But YouTube executives have insisted for a while that long-tail videos will play a big role in the site’s future, and the new move underscores that.

“I think they are working [the long tail] hard but are not articulating it well,” the head of a competing Web video company told me earlier this month. “It may be because they are worried about how advertisers and agencies will view them, but it may also be that they are not revealing it all until it’s farther along.” Yesterday, YouTube gave us another peek.

YouTube says it’s highlighting the Bill Murray/Dan Akroyd/Sigourney Weaver classic because this summer is the movie’s 25th anniversary.

Which is true! But I’m pretty sure the site is also trying to remind both Hollywood studios and run-of-the-mill YouTube users that the site can and does run more than just short, home-brewed clips–it’s got a bunch of movies, TV shows, and other “premium content,” too.

Not nearly as much as Hulu, of course, but YouTube is still trying to figure out how to change that. One way is by simply creating special sections to highlight movies and TV shows, which is one of the reasons it got Sony’s (SNE) Crackle on board last spring. Another is to offer content owners special incentives to hand over their stuff to the world’s biggest video site.

If you do watch “Ghostbusters,” for instance, note that the traditional YouTube player has been replaced by one from Crackle. YouTube also recently agreed to let Disney’s ESPN.com (ESPN) use its own player as well.

On the other hand, there’s still plenty of other “premium content” on YouTube that doesn’t appear to be sanctioned by the contents’ owners and that doesn’t appear to be generating any revenue or other benefit for them, either. Like this grainy, but still excellent, “Ghostbusters” excerpt:

For YouTube, which has been struggling to monetize the 330 million visitors coming its way each month, this may be the beginning of the business model that has so far eluded it. That said, the company is going to have to offer those visitors a bit more than grainy “MacGyver” reruns if it hopes to prevent them from turning to Hulu for premium long-form video content.

For YouTube, which has been struggling to monetize the 330 million visitors coming its way each month, this may be the beginning of the business model that has so far eluded it. That said, the company is going to have to offer those visitors a bit more than grainy “MacGyver” reruns if it hopes to prevent them from turning to Hulu for premium long-form video content.