Depending on the year and the network, you’ll also hear some lip service paid to digital. Yesterday, for instance, Fox played up its popularity on Facebook. (Both Fox and this Web site are owned by News Corp.)

But these events really aren’t the place to be if you’re trying to reach Web eyeballs: The TV ad guys are paid to sell TV ads, and they’re happy to explain why TV is the best place to spend your money.

Here’s how NBC chairman Ted Harbert put it yesterday, during his network’s pitch. Technology is great, he said. But!

What we really need to focus on is a lot more of the back-breaking blocking and tackling that brings great stories and great characters to television–or what I call now–the “big screen”…

Of course we have to embrace change. We know that consumers are looking for content any place they can get it.

And I’m no different from anyone else. I love catching up on episodes of “Parenthood” on nbc.com. The xfinity app actually works. And like you, I like all devices that begin with the letter “i.” And I’d be lost without my laptop.

But please remember: The best and most popular, most salable content starts here.

Now to put some things in perspective. According to our close friends at Nielsen, each week, people spend almost 38 hours in front of the television set, only 20 minutes a week watching video online, and just four minutes a week watching mobile video.

So until George Jetson shows up and folds his spacecar into a briefcase, the big screen is still the best place to watch video. Whether you’re a 26-year-old media buyer, part of a family of four, or an alpha boomer like me.

If you’re so inclined, it would be easy to listen to Harbert’s pitch and conclude that he’s a dinosaur. But a better word would be “pragmatist”.

Traditional TV may or may not be in the midst of a disruption, but for now it’s a $70 billion business. Web video ads? $1 billion. Until the gap between those numbers closes a bit, Harbert and his new employers at Comcast are going to spend most of their time on the big screen.

So here’s a candidate: “The Event,” a “Lost”-style serial that NBC had big hopes for last fall, but doesn’t want anymore.

Comcast’s broadcast network has cancelled the show in advance of Monday’s upfront presentation, where it will try to sell its new stuff to advertisers. But Deadline.com floats the notion that the producers of “The Event” will find a new home for the show, and reporter Nellie Andreeva says she hears “new original programming player Netflix’s name tossed around.”

Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey won’t comment on the report, but I’ll go ahead and file it under “possible but not likely.” That’s because:

• It’s not unheard of for shows that start out on one network to find new life somewhere else. But those are usually shows that have lasted multiple seasons. “The Event” just limped through a single one.
• That short run also makes it seem like “The Event” would be a hard sell for Netflix. If the service had access to past seasons of the show, and had seen significant subscriber interest, it’d be easier to justify. But in this case, it would have to guess that something that didn’t appeal to NBC’s audience would resonate with Netflix users. That’s a pretty big leap.

Then again, I said the same thing about reports that Netflix was going to foot a big part of the bill for a “House Of Cards,” a new HBO-style series from Kevin Spacey. And that turned out to be true. So I’ll leave myself just a bit of wiggle room here: Ya never know!

Here, as a reminder, is the show that few of you have been watching:

The numbers, via parent company GE’s (GE) release this morning: NBCU posted a $732 million operating profit, up 13 percent year over year, on revenue of $4 billion, which is down 20 percent. Important footnote: As GE explained during its earnings call, if you adjust NBCU’s performance for one-time gains, operating profit would actually be down nine percent.

Still, even that result is an improvement over previous quarters. So perhaps those numbers will cheer Comcast investors, who have been beating up the cable company ever since news of its talks to buy NBCU surfaced last month.

GE usually spends very little time discussing NBCU’s performance during its earnings calls, since investors are much more concerned with the rest of the company’s performance, and in particular, its troubled finance arm. But perhaps the pending Comcast (CMCSA) deal will change that this time around.

Some notes from the earnings call: GE CEO Jeff Immelt has joined the “recession is over” crowd, but only mentioned NBCU briefly during his opening statement. He says scatter pricing–ads that marketers buy during the TV season, as opposed to the spring “upfronts”–is “better.”

GE booked a $283 million one-time gain from the sale of some of its stake in the A&E cable channel. And it took charges on write-downs related to its stake in NDTV, its Indian TV investment, as well as the Weather Channel, which it bought alongside some private equity groups for $3.5 billion last year. But the company still ends up $89 million ahead in the one-time events column–the equivalent of a penny per share of earnings.

And as the company explains in the table below, if you take out the one-time gains, NBCU’s quarterly profit increase turns into a loss. This is a reverse of previous quarters, when the company told investors to ignore one-time losses that made horrible earnings look even worse.

More color on the scatter market: CFO Keith Sherin says Q4 pricing is up “double digits” for primetime TV spots, and more than 20 percent for cable TV.

Asked a vague question about the proposed NBCU deal, Immelt gave a vague answer, noting that while “NBCU is a great franchise that’s consistently delivered income growth and cash…we always evaluate our portfolio.” He then suggested that GE doesn’t need to sell NBCU, which is the right thing to say. “We just want to be ready for several scenarios….We don’t have a specific pronouncement, or a specific need for cash.”

Here’s GE’s broad-stroke description of NBCU’s quarter (click to enlarge):

That’s the prediction from Barclays Capital’s Anthony DiClemente, who says that a combination of factors–first and foremost, a lousy economy–will force the networks to sell less advertising, at lower prices, than they have for quite some time. Translation: DiClemente sees a 15 percent drop in upfront sales this year–the first double-digit drop for the networks since 2002.

CBS (CBS) will be in the least vulnerable position since it has the strongest ratings, DiClemente says, and will see revenue drop 10 percent. But GE’s (GE) NBC, the ratings laggard, will see dollars drop by nearly 20 percent; the fact that it’s stripping out five hours of network programming and replacing it with Jay Leno (who will presumably be OK after his hospitalization) doesn’t help. Here’s his network-by-network breakdown (click table to enlarge):

One impact for Web video sites like Hulu, the joint venture between NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, and very soon, Disney’s (DIS) ABC: DiClemente figures that the networks will start throwing in Web ads as sweeteners for broadcast buys, which should push down ad rates for Web video in general.

The “buy”-a-“real”-ad-get-a-Web-ad-for-free sales pitch is one that media conglomerates have been moving away from in recent years, but all bets are off right now. Big Media will sacrifice Web pricing in order to shore up offline sales, which are still much more important.

The good news: The upfronts are increasingly less important to the networks’ health and even less so for their corporate parents (click table to enlarge):

And if you’re a very optimistic network executive, you can hold out hope that the economy rebounds later on this year and the ads you didn’t sell this spring become much more valuable in the fall. Could happen, right?