Late last year Brian Stelter of CNN interviewed Barry Diller. Diller is currently the Chairman and Senior Executive of IAC. However, his career spans advertising, motion pictures, cable TV and Internet sites, so he has a unique perspective on the mediascape.

In the interview, Diller reframes cable TV, broadcasting and television as we know it. Here’s a transcription of the clip:

“Stelter: Are you bearish on cable as a whole industry? Meaning on the bundle?

Diller: No — no, no, no. You have to separate. I actually think that cable, which is now no longer — these words don’t make sense any more, because it really isn’t really cable as we know it. Cable companies are now much more interested in data and broadband. That is where in fact the margins are high and they don’t have to deal with program suppliers, who they all hate. Why do they hate them? Because they keep raising prices. And so, the margins in the old program business have deteriorated while the margins in the broadband business are wondrous. So, you can’t really call them cable companies any more. I don’t even think you can even call broadcast companies, broadcast companies any more, because their over the air signals are now very little in use in terms of direct reception. They’re all being carried by data systems, which is a new word for cable.

Stelter: I love when you say these words don’t make sense any more.

Diller: They don’t. I mean, they really don’t. Because this transformation we’re going through, the radicalism, which is THE Internet, which once it got the capacity to carry rich data, meaning moving pictures and movies, whatever you call it — rich data, once that happened, it was inevitable that it would bust things wide and the result of course is that you’re seeing transformations in all of these businesses.

Stelter: How do you define the word “television”.

Diller: Well television is also a stupid word. Because we think of television — we used to think obviously television was three channels and them it expanded by cable to dozens, hundreds of channels and then thousands and millions of channels via broadband. So, the idea of what you quote “call television” — is televison Netflix? Well people don’t really think it is. They’re trying to make these distinctions. It’s video. You know, I mean, it’s video.

Stelter: So that’s the best word now? For anything like this?

Diller: I don’t know. Make up any word you like. It will probably — television — you know — tele-vision. Just think of the derivation of the word and it kind of I guess applies. Except in people’s minds, television is the old system.”

My take: This is all about separating content from its transmission mode. Commercial over-the-air broadcast technology arrived in the 1940s — it then took numerous decades for TV programming to evolve into its current format. Cable TV appeared in the 1980s and Broadband only 10 years ago. Over-the-air, then cable and now broadband: each new mode of transmission increased the number of channels exponentially, giving more choice to consumers and more outlets to producers. The rub is to figure out how the economics will continue to work. Diller points out that the technological way in which the viewers get the content is where the profit lies.