You have touched on the real issue with most of the broadcast and cable TV networks: It’s paid for by advertising. That is a much different model than Netflix, whose customers are primarily the viewers (in the advertising model, advertisers are the customers and viewers are the PRODUCT).

It’s a dying model today, both on TV and on the Web (sorry, Google). The future of advertising is native advertising (watch the Netflix produced content carefully and you will see some of it). Native advertising gets rid of the interruption with some other content that’s supposed to convince you of something, and instead embeds your brand unobtrusively INSIDE the content. That’s actually how Medium does it. You can’t really even tell the paid content from the non-paid, can you?