Don’t Touch That Remote: TV Pilots Turn to Net, Not Networks

In the television pilot that Cheyenne Jackson taped recently, he played an aggressive young news anchor whose ascendancy threatened an older colleague. It was a fitting metaphor for the industry itself, because while Mr. Jackson had taped pilots for ABC, NBC and USA before, this was his first time doing one for a new challenger to those alphabet networks: Amazon.

When Amazon sizes up the television marketplace, it sees opportunity. Internet-delivered TV, which until recently was unready for prime time, is the new front in the war for Americans’ attention spans. Netflix is following up on the $100 million drama “House of Cards” with four more series this year. Microsoft is producing programming for the Xbox video game console with the help of a former CBS president. Other companies, from AOL to Sony to Twitter, are likely to follow. The companies are, in effect, creating new networks for television through broadband pipes and also giving rise to new rivalries — among one another, as between Amazon and Netflix, and with the big but vulnerable broadcast networks as well.