The internet is frequently better than TV, because merit is free to boil to the surface without being stifled. It’s not that the internet is free of bland tripe. But merely that it’s costly to force bland tripe to the front, and when the state-sponsored tripe gets upstaged by something better, it’s harder to bury the higher quality content.
The problem with the internet is the firehose of The Long Tail ultimately does bury absolutlely everything (good and bad), so once again, over time everything is obscured by default, leading to micro-generation gaps (maybe spanning as little as two years) and reasonably large subcultures that never see the light of day.
On some level though, the movie industry has proven that profits don’t matter, since we see that for the last decade, profitable movies are mostly unwatchable garbage.
So, even if TV manages to be profitable, it can surely deserve the same sideshow status as movies. The only thing the internet paradoxically lacks right now (despite massive unicorn companies with nigh unlimited resources) is the unrestrained budget movies enjoy. And this is because the most captivating things on the internet are authentic in real time, and cannot be “budgeted” in a traditional sense.