I'm pretty sure that there's no way to do this without effectively just releasing pristine copies that somebody will cut the ads out of within 5 minutes of them being posted. They could use their own DRM'd file format and media player, but that would be broken in a week and have the effect of just releasing copies that somebody would cut the ads out of within 5 minutes of them beng posted.

I can't think of any scheme except maybe releasing content through torrents that no one would care about enough to cut the ads out within 5 minutes of it being posted.

Wait - maybe intense product placement/integration into television shows? It's inevitable really; with DVRs most people aren't watching traditional commercials anyway. Maybe content producers need to, as a group, get over the artistic squeamishness they have about setting scenes in a Taco Bell...

Maybe the answer might be as per jrockway's comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2958478. Ditch ads, put up a massive torrent site with killer bandwidth, charge 50 cents a torrent. Entire season for 7 bucks, no risk of prosecution? Might be worth it to most people. Trickle of cash recieved in perpetuity? Might be able to finance pretty high quality shows.

OK - flight of fancy coming: How about an investment market for television shows and movies? People put together trailers, pilots, or maybe just announcements and attachments to a project, and people can buy shares in that project based on how many absurdly cheap downloads they think it can wrangle, and they buy those shares on the same site where the torrent will be hosted for download. The gambling prospect would be a pretty good incentive for people to already have credit card attached accounts when it comes to downloading, and good investments could pay for your habit, or even bring a return. These shares could be traded in perpetuity, and would pay dividends monthly of the download revenue minus the infrastucture cost.

Even farther down the rabbit hole: The cost per download could be determined by an (open) algorithm combined with a voting system by the current shareholders. If they're not liking their return, they could state what they think the ideal price would be to maximize that return, and that price would be weighted with their amount of ownership to determine the current price of that content. Maybe to simplify that system, they could be given simple upvotes and downvotes? I feel that the math could be worked out.

This would incentivize shareholders to market the content themselves in social and in blogs.

Completely crazy talk: Free downloads of collections of trailers. Shareholders of one film could vote to dilute and give shares in their content to the shareholders of content that is sure to attract a large group of eager downloaders, in order to have the trailer to their film or sample of their show included in a collection that the known anticipated content will also be on.

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Maybe this is an efficient way to motivate people to

1. Invest in the shows that they like,
2. Proselytize about the shows they like,
3. Watch (and pay trivial amounts for) content in order to be familiar with the market (especially obscure content, to get an edge.), and
4. Set by guessing the prices that people would be likely to pay for content.

For me, this might be the MMORPG/fantasy baseball from hell. I'd be futzing around with my investments and looking for new things that were coming out all day.

edited: for clarity.