Modern Family is a fantastic show. It feels fresher, more relvant to the times, and in a word--more modern than mostly everything else out there. It embraces the uniqueness of the present, incorporating Facebook and iPads into the storyline.  Thusly, I couldn't have been more surprised when I saw this interview with Modern Family creator Steve Levitan.

The saddest part about Levitan's statements? When he dismisses his Hulu faithful because he frankly "doesn't get any credit" for the views. He has a top 10 show that could be top 2-3 for crying out loud. Nielsen won't you give it to him?

Where did my viewers go?
The issue isn't that Hulu is "siphoning" off viewers. Viewers are viewers are viewers. Live viewers have more value because advertisers know more about them and can target accordingly. But in the same respect, internet viewers can be tracked much more specifically and accurately than traditional television viewers. Maybe the issue isn't the fact that Hulu is stealing away viewers, but that these viewers are considered stolen at all? Data is only as good as the method of collection, and if analytics firms are ignoring digital views when compiling top 10 lists then maybe we need more accurate top 10 lists?

Radio to TV to Internet.
What do digital viewers mean to me? At one point it was a zero sum game: TV=home entertainment, and networks focused on battling it out with each other. Households centered around the television so religiously that if you weren't watching TV you weren't in the market to be entertained at home. Yet now I can fill my nights up with reading anything and everything on the internet, watching cats roll around and babies bite fingers. Now television shows have to compete with other forms of home entertainment. Similarly to how TV overtook radio, the internet is overtaking TV in percent share of our leisure (and work) time. It is simply a better distribution medium. Better for users and advertisors alike as there is a 2-way channel for communication. With users preferring to be online than watching "live TV" I would claim that a large percentage of digital/on-demand viewers actually represents an incremental market.

An incremental market means an incremental revenue stream. If Levitan is assesing things like the head of the studio, I would hope that top 10 revenue numbers matter more to him than top 10 weekly ratings. If I were a studio head I would focus on monetizing a viewer base that wants to be monetized (since they're on Hulu and not torrents). The question here is whether Hulu is the best avenue through which to monetize.

I'm positive that network executives are aware of all of this. They're simply in a bind as they have to carry along the baggage from their prior relationship with TV to the new, more lively internet (who actually "communicates back" and doesn't just sit there). And it's up to the web entrepreneurs to ease this transition.