“Who cares about The Format, Quality, and Ads.”

Anyone who’s a true fan of the show, that’s who. At least with television broadcasts, you can record it ahead of time, and skip the commercials. Any sort of anti-consumer control designed to prevent users from doing this (as well as format shifting, rewinding the funny parts, etc) will only anger the viewers, and then everyone loses.

And quality is a huge factor in determining whether or not something is worth watching. With broadcasts, the signal is guaranteed to produce a good picture regardless of your screen size. With digital streams, however, you can usually only watch it at the size and resolution that your bandwidth will allow, or what they’re willing to show. At least with Youtube, Dailymotion, etc, you can go full screen, but even that isn’t as good as the real thing. The video is compressed, and resizing it makes it more pixelated and sometimes slows the video down.