I bought it Saturday night, watched it on the plane Sunday, and laughed out loud, a bunch. You should do it, and there’s a good chance you have — techland loved this story this weekend. Also, again: It’s very funny.

But What Does It All Mean? Not a ton. It’s an evolutionary step, relevant to a select group of people who make entertainment. With one interesting twist.

The part that isn’t new here is Louis C.K. using the Web and doing it on his own. We’ve seen a bunch of that over the years, mostly from entertainers who have already become famous (or at least semi-famous) with the help of mainstream media. Prince and Radiohead sold their own music only after they sold lots of songs for big music labels. Adam Carolla leapt/got pushed from TV and radio gigs into podcasting.

The new twist here is the way his experiment changes video “windows” — which determine when shows and movies show up on different outlets. By going direct-to-fan first, C.K. doesn’t shut off his chance to end up working the Big Media Companies he says he doesn’t want to work with. He’s just making them wait. So the people who really love him can get it right away, and he can capture almost all of that value in the transaction.

We’ll call it the Louis C.K. Window.

It can run for a week, or a month, or however long he’d like to be the sole outlet for his show. But then, if he wants to get more money for his product and reach a different audience, C.K. can sell the program to HBO or Showtime or Netflix for a “pay-TV window.” And then, eventually, to the likes of Comedy Central or FX. At some point, he can retail discs and downloads via Amazon and iTunes, etc.

The Louis C.K. Window is the most gratifying, because it’s cool, and because he’ll keep almost every penny his fans spend to see him. But it’s also likely to expose him to the smallest number of people.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that a million people pony up for the concert — basically, that is, everyone who watches his (great) show on News Corp.’s FX channel. (News Corp. owns this site, too.)

That’s a wildly optimistic estimate, and it will still be a fraction of the people that HBO, which has some 28 million subscribers, can reach. You can fault Big Media for a lot of things, but it remains pretty good at rounding up Big Audiences.

But that’s the great thing about the Louis C.K. Window. It lets Louis C.K. — and a relatively small group of people with big ambitions, and ardent fans — have it both ways.

So, yes, the quote from Prince about the Internet being “completely over” made him sound like a Luddite idiot.

And adding that computers and other digital gadgets “just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you” pushed the music superstar over the edge into seeming like that crazy ranting dude you often encounter on the street claiming the government has invaded his brain.

But–after spending several days here in Los Angeles this week, talking to execs, talent and others who toil in the entertainment industry–I can’t say what I am hearing is that much different in terms of the continuing frustration with the lack of decent business models to replace the ones that have worked for so long and been so lucrative for the entertainment and media industry.

From music to movies to television, the biggest minds here still sound perplexed as to what will finally be the golden ticket to carry them through to the inevitable next era of digital distribution.

Still, so many questions and so few answers.

Will consumers buy subscriptions to cloud-based content? Will advertising be enough to pay for broadcasting online? Who will pay for the high up-front production costs of most major entertainment projects? Can costs come down enough to make up the difference?

And while there is now a lot of interest around tablets, such as the Apple (AAPL) iPad, and Hollywood types seem to accept that their customers are shifting their buying and consumption habits around entertainment drastically, there still remains a level of outright hostility to it all that has not changed much.

“Why is the consumer always right?” said one exec to me this week in a typical statement. “You can’t have a business if there is no business model.”

Indeed. And, in fact, that’s just what Steve Levitan, co-creator of “Modern Family,” the ABC television hit, talked about cogently at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference last month, telling a largely tech-centric crowd some truths it much needed to hear.

(FYI: We’ll be posting the video of the entire interview session with Levitan and also longtime Hollywood player Lloyd Braun here tomorrow.)

As much as he himself loves tech products, Levitan noted that lack of a business plan or credit for consumption online made digital largely pointless to his work.

“At its core, 90 percent of my job is still sitting down in a room full of people and breaking stories,” he said. “And that requires virtually no technology.”

It’s a salient point and not so different from Prince’s saying: “I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.”

If you remove the sillier parts of his quote that preceded it, such a statement is not unreasonable from an artist who wants to be paid for his creative efforts.

Thus, instead of mocking that sentiment, perhaps it is time for tech leaders to figure out a way to keep talent from being dragged into the future without so much kicking and screaming.

Or, as Prince might sing: He was dreamin’ of being paid when he said the Internet was over, so sue him if he went 2 fast.

Speaking of which, Prince really deserves a little more respect, folks, if only for his classic “1999,” seen here (jacked onto the Web, natch):

“The Internet [is] completely over. The Internet [is] like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated.”

— Musician Prince explores a new vocation: Internet troll

But at least it contains every Prince song ever recorded, right? Nope. From what I can tell, the only thing the gadget comes preloaded with is a 15-song, 40-minute concert video.

This wouldn’t even compute in the pre-Lehman era. So what gives?

Unlike other special-edition iPods from U2 and “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, you can’t get this one directly from Apple (AAPL). Instead, you have to buy it bundled alongside a high-end book of Prince photographs produced by Kraken Opus, a British publisher that says its mission is to create the “most epic, stunning, iconic publications ever seen in the world.”

And by Kraken Opus standards, by the way, the Prince book/iPod combo is a steal: The books the company produced for the Arsenal soccer team, for instance, can set you back $6,247–and comes with no gadget of any sort.

I’d love to send you off with a Prince video, but it’s awfully hard to find one on YouTube. His old record label, Warner Music Group (WMG), is feuding with Google (GOOG) and has taken down most of the official clips from the video site. And the artist himself is vigilant about taking down clips he doesn’t approve of. So we’ll have to settle for a few seconds of Stephen Colbert dancing to a golden oldie at the Smithsonian.