Fred Wilson has an excellent blog post
on the topic of online syndication and the future of digital
entertainment.  He’s been nailing this issue for a long time
now.  This is great free consulting for the content publishing
industry:

“Here’s the bottom line. In the digital medium, the content should be
syndicated as broadly as possible. If iTunes wants to charge $1.99 for
the shows, let them.  If WRAL wants to stream the shows with ads
(and download them for a small fee), let them.

CBS should do the same on its website.  I think they should offer
RSS feeds of every show in their lineup.  The service should be
either subscription driven or ad supported or ideally offer both
options.

This is the digital medium we are talking about.  Bits are
bits.  They are going to get widely distributed anyway. 
That’s how this medium works.  If CBS understands that, they’ll
forget about exclusivity, which doesn’t work online anyway, and make
their content ubiquitious, monetize it with whatever business models
their distribution partners want to use, take a cut of the action, and
they should do the same themselves on their websites and then sit back
and watch the digital medium work its magic.”