From time to time, a friendly skirmish arises in which media experts divvy up sides to debate the assertion, "content is king. " That content and delivery platforms are complementary assets whose values tend to rise or fall in tandem is courteously set aside. This argument is about grabbing shares on the media revenue pie chart.

The game rests on a reality: it is rarely easy to set proper terms between partners. One response in the market has, therefore, been vertical integration. When one enterprise owns both the delivery network and the content that flows over it, no tricky division is needed. This approach sacrifices gains from specialisation, however. Our era is filled with examples suggesting these gains are large. They include the financial failure of the AOL-Time Warner merger, the dominance of independent (non-cable) program networks in cable and satellite, and the spectacular rise of Google.