Most of the current institutional broadcast powerhouses will not move easily into the new digital paradigm. We’re seeing that everyone from the cable companies to the established networks are using their mighty capabilities of lobbying, extensive financial resources, slanted news stories to name a few, to delay what is the inevitable shift to online distribution.

However, their reluctance to change this model is not unwarranted. The TV business model has worked exceptionally well as a bold revenue driver for these media companies. TV advertising was a $74.5 billion business {link no longer active} in 2013, but recent numbers show that digital advertising surpassed Broadcast TV for the first time in 2013, with $42.8 billion in revenue compared to $40.1 billion.  Times are changing and TV is getting with it.

Vince McMahon wants to place a bet on “over the top,” or “OTT” TV. OTT being the industry term used to describe a network that doesn’t use intermediaries like cable companies and satellite operators to distribute. They use such avenues as iTunes, the Google Play Store, Xbox, PlayStation 4, Netflix and Hulu to name a few. Take the immense power of the digital media — the same one that lets every person be a media company — and give it to a risk-taking juggernaut and looks to innovation as a way of bypassing existing standards and conventions. McMahon is known as the pay-per-view pioneer, making a fortune off an innovative new way to distribute content on TV, so it makes sense that for him, a swift adaptation to OTT was a given.

The WWE Network now lives on a site these days. It costs $9.99 per month for a 6 month membership and provides access to all 12 yearly pay-per-view events, a library of all past matches available on-demand, new shows and 24 hours of daily programming. According to their latest reports, the WWE Network has 667,000 online subscribers just 42 days after launch, earning $40 million for a 6 month period. They need about 1 million subscribers to break even on the project and they are certainly on their way. While not stellar, it’s a strong launch. By comparison WWE’s Raw show yields a weekly 4.37 million viewers. Historically, television rights fees approach $170 million annually, a high figure that WWE is unafraid to cannibalize by going OTT.

Consumers are adopting a myriad of expanding OTT video options: solutions that are provided by new entrants into the market like Netflix and traditional media companies hedging for a foothold in the new video consumption ecosystem such as Hulu, NBC, ABC, and Crackle and a disparate number of technology companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and others. In addition, a report from Business Insider {link no longer active} estimates that 53 million US households will own connected TVs by 2016, accounting for 43 percent of households. Streaming notables Netflix ended 2013 with a total of 44 million subscribers and Amazon Prime currently has 20 million subscribers.

The big TV networks and video focused digital companies are already providing consumers multi-platform viewing options. Viewers can install apps from NBC, ABC, CBS, Crackle, Funnyordie and Hulu and take “TV” on-the-go.

Mobile is a key player in the disruption of the TV business and the push to programmatic TV. Business Insider’s Mobile Video Content {link no longer active} report shows that 15 percent of all online video hours occur on a mobile device. The infamous YouTube Channel Machinima sees 50 percent of its video views come from mobile devices while 5 percent of Netflix’s traffic comes from mobile devices and YouTube sees an overall 18 percent.

A particularly disruptive technology is currently being heard in a Supreme Court case. Aereo is being sued by big broadcasters because of the method by which the company distributes TV signals. Paying no rebroadcast fees to the TV networks whose content they distribute, Aereo uses clusters of tiny antennas that stream signals into the cloud for storage. Paying subscribers, one hundred thousand currently in New York, are sent the TV signal. If Aereo wins the case, Les Moonves, CEO of CBS, stated his intention to stop over the air distribution and instead focus more on internet distribution methods. Certainly other networks would follow suit.

Troubled relationships between cable companies and content providers have affected the end consumer’s TV viewing experience. These challenges abound in a time where cable companies are getting increasingly worried about losing favor to online distribution. In August 2013, Time Warner Cable sparred with CBS {link no longer active} over broadcast rights and carrier fees. While the deal was negotiated, 3 million subscribers in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Denver and Dallas lost all CBS channels, including Showtime and CBS Sports Network for about a month.

Time Warner Cable recently paid the Los Angeles Dodgers $8.5 billion in a 25 year deal to carry the Dodger-owned SportsNet LA.  Competitors DirectTV, Cox, AT&T, Verizon and Dish have not agreed to terms with Time Warner Cable, who all claim the high cost of carriage is out of line.  As of Dodger’s Opening Day an estimated 70 percent of Los Angeles’ TV market cannot watch their home team from home.

All this change in media delivery and consumer viewing habits will change the way advertisers do business. Enter programmatic TV.

The programmatic approach uses data on a scale that humans can’t handle and turns it into actionable ad serving decisions. We are talking about synthesizing billions of data points daily among ad impressions, clicks, revenue, audience behavior, audience profile data and more.  The programmatic approach is redefining advertising. This new operational aspect of advertising is one of two main paradigms forming the new world of media activation. The other is the native advertising/content marketing/influencer marketing construct where highly customized and ultra-high value ads are crafted in a very high touch process.

The key to this entire endeavor — applying the programmatic approach to TV buying — are 2 points: first, TV media needs to be redefined, and second, it needs to look and act more like digital media. It’s these new distribution methods that lead into the second point. The guts and operational aspects of these new channels are built on digital media systems. The same delivery, data, tracking and analysis methods that web publishers use will become the de facto method of operating an OTT channel.

Editorial Note: This piece is part of a 4 part series from Director of [ion] and [a]list contributor Robert Brill. The series intends to look at the future of programmatic and data-infused TV buying as well as its connection with influencer marketing with predictions about how this will change the media landscape. To read last week’s piece, go here.