The wonder of the Internet is the enormous, enormous amount of content it makes available to all of us. It's one of those mind-benders, like: "if you added up the length of all the digital audio and video accessible via the Internet, it would amount to 15 billion years worth of linear playback... Or the age of the universe." I have no idea if that's true or not, or even if it's within several orders of magnitude (no one does)... but it's a HUGE number.

The last decade has been all about bringing that content online and accessible, with ever-improving user experiences. Currently, many of us are focused on spiraling all this content out to all the various consuming devices available: PC's, phones, tablets, TV's, embedded devices, clothing (soon? :-) ) etc...  and enabling us to easily pass "the best" content on to our friends and followers, to any of their preferred devices. It's a VERY exciting time for those of us involved in this work.  Hooray for that!

But there is a very large elephant in the room: the supply / demand balance is now totally out of whack. There is exponentially more supply than demand. And the gap is ever-widening.  It's not that people are demanding less content (they're demanding more and more - especially as the number of consuming devices proliferate), it's that we have a fixed and relatively short time to consume it (24 hours is the most we get in a day).

This is an inherent problem with linear content: it requires time to ingest. 

This "natural law" problem causes massive fragmentation in the content distribution business, and poses a big threat to content programmers. For instance, TV networks place big, big "bets" on a tiny, tiny, TINY fraction of available video content. That's a tough model to sustain, given all the above.