Really, you have to give them credit for trying.

When NBC tried to convince viewers to lock onto their network for an entire evening, branding it ‘Must See TV,’ I’m sure they thought the positioning statement was catchy. And it was. Problem is, it didn’t work.

Fact is, we’re at the end of the generation where people lock onto a station and keep with it for an evening. Today, our loyalty is to specific shows, not network or station brands. Nobody stays home to watch Fox TV; we watch Trading Spaces, then flip to This Hour Has 22 Minutes, then flip again. Digital television’s on-screen TV guides and PVRs just reinforce the behaviour. We tune in by show brand, not station brand.

Television broadcasters’ reaction to this so far has been to panic, spraying their territory with increasingly opaque lower-right-corner logos. They reduce ad inventory to add more station promos, reminding viewers that YOU ARE WATCHING US!

It’s silly, pointless, and worse, in vain. Because like it or not, television broadcasters’ role as advertising middlemen is coming to an end. Stepping up to replace them: cable companies.

First, a bit of background.

The cable companies’ on-demand systems are a bit pathetic right now. Their movies are passable, but television show offerings are lacking. My cable provider, Shaw (and believe me, if only my house faced a satellite-friendly bearing…), has such riveting television offerings as kids shows and, er, kids shows.

But, in time, those media libraries will build up. And economies of scale will kick in when more viewers opt to pick and choose programs. Cable providers will drop the price, bundling show packages where, for instance, you can watch any TV show in history you want on-demand for one night, for $5.95.

And what would happen? TV station brands, as we know them today, will disappear. Independent program producers will sell directly to, essentially, managers of massive hard drives who will serve the video content directly to the cable providers. Broadcasters will be cut out of the loop, and advertisers will have to cosy up to these new content providers – the cable companies.

This, then, will be the TV networks’ biggest challenge in the post-convergence world: trying to maintain their relevancy and share-of-mind (which, of course, translate into ad dollars) while becoming visually irrelevant in the eyes of their viewers. And advertising agencies and media buyers will be finding a new partner to dance with.

As an advertiser, who do you want to carry your message or your client’s message? You want the player with the closest relationship to the content consumer. And that will be the cable company. Not television broadcasters. Remember that the cable company provides the important role of the middleman – hand-holding, convenient point of contact, a human face, and so on.

And thanks to new technologies that let digital cable companies know what channel you’re on, who you are, and what program you’re watching, they’re primed to become the power brokers of real-time viewing habit information. Why wait until the next ratings book when you can get real-time stats of who’s tuning in?

Advertisers can run a crawl across the screen bottom in all households with a six-figure income and at least two kids. Rumour has it, some digital cable box manufacturers are considering inserting an artificial ‘boot-up’ time for next-generation boxes. This will, of course, give cable companies additional screen-time to sell.

Now imagine this. You’re in your boardroom with your client or your VP of marketing, watching a big screen tallying viewer response in real-time as your precious million-dollar 30-second spot airs for the first time.

This isn’t technology that’s far down the line. The American networks have used a sort of mood polygraph for years now in major elections, where they put a small focus group of voters in a room and make them watch a candidate’s platform speech, indicating a positive or negative response to each utterance with a two-button remote.

Now imagine being able to drill down into that chart and break it out into any permutation of demographical and psychographical groups you can dream of.

You’ll be able to. You think your media buying spreadsheet looks complicated now.

Tod Maffin (www.todmaffin.com) is a technology futurist who speaks at dozens of conferences around North America about the future of media, advertising, and business. He is the national technology columnist for CBC Radio and CBC Television’s Canada Now. His free trends newsletter and Web site are at www.futurefile.com.