The decision won't get TiVo into EchoStar's machines. Consider that bridge burnt. But investors likely believe the ruling will strengthen TiVo's hands in negotiations with other pay-TV providers, who may fear a patent suit if they don't get in bed with TiVo. Already, TiVo provides software for Comcast DVRs.

On CinemaNow's company background page, it lists Hollywood studios such as 20th Century Fox and Disney as well as TV networks ABC and NBC as suppliers. But there are a few more. Like Vivid and Hustler, for starters. Also: Red Light District, Evil Angel Video, New Sensations and Elegant Angel.

How big a part of CinemaNow's business is porn? CinemaNow marketing director Lawrence Novitch told me "it's a big piece of the pie" but didn't provide exact figures. However, traffic stats provide a clue. When CinemaNow customers go to rent an adult film, they're redirected to a separate domain, AllAdultChannel.com. One way to see approximately how much of the company's business is porn is to compare traffic to CinemaNow.com and AllAdultChannel.com.

As you can see, for most of 2007, traffic to AllAdultChannel.com exceeded CinemaNow.com considerably. Traffic to each site is about even now, though Compete.com puts AllAdultChannel's "people count" slightly higher. If that's a good predictor of usage, then porn's piece of CinemaNow's pie is big indeed.

Not that we blame them for a second. Porn could be CinemaNow's secret weapon in the online-video battle. In a comparison test between online movie rental stores Amazon Unbox, Apple iTunes, Netflix and CinemaNow, Bloomberg News today rated CinemaNow the highest with an 8/10. Bloomberg's writer rewarded the site for its mix of new and old titles and its easy user interface. (The review did not clarify whether the site can be operated one-handed.)

The porn business has always been the first to monetize new technologies on the Internet. So while Apple, Amazon.com and Netflix wait around for watching movies online to become a mainstream activity — some go as far as to predict Netflix won't survive to see it happen — Microsoft, Cisco, Lionsgate, and CinemaNow's other backers may come to know the true meaning of "money shot."

As long as viewers can't click on a television commercial or otherwise alert an advertiser that their pitch succeeded or failed, TV commercials will remain undertargeted and obnoxious. Yes, that means Chevy will continue to tell you this is our country for quite some time.

Here's what I think Brin meant to say, but couldn't.

Google is currently testing TV advertising with satellite provider EchoStar, which just purchased Sling Media. Sling Media makes a device called the Slingbox. It relays television through the Internet for viewing on a PC.

If Google were to introduce an advertising unit similar to its YouTube InVideo ads for this subset of TV viewers, it could, perhaps, start to make TV advertising as accountable as Brin suggested it already was.

When a Google TV/EchoStar advertiser's commercial shows up on a PC screen through a Slingbox, Google could make a link to the advertiser available. Then, Google would have click-through data and actual accountability. But not until then.

For now, all Google can determine is whether a given TV set is actually turned on and tuned to a specific channel at the time an ad runs; it also claims to detect when people change channel in the middle of an ad. But if you go to the toilet mid-ad? Google has no clue. The fact that it had to turn to Nielsen to supplement this with demographics about the people watching an ad just goes to show how weak Google's TV-ad data really is. Funny how no one seems to be holding Google accountable for this.

(Photo by danagraves)

Sling Media's main product, the Slingbox, differs in a key way from popular digital video recorders like TiVo. Instead of recording programs for later display in the living room, the Slingbox rebroadcasts what's on your TV, live, to your laptop, cell phone, or other Net-connected screens. While TiVo lets you shift TV shows in time, Slingbox lets you move TV programming to other places. (This is especially handy if, say, you want to follow your home team's games, only available on your local cable system, while you're on the road.)

Obviously, a Slingbox could be hooked up to EchoStar's Dish Network boxes. But it could just as easily be connected to a DirecTV box, or a cable hookup. So why would EchoStar buy something that's so hard to turn into a proprietary advantage?

Obviously, EchoStar could introduce set-top boxes that have Slingbox functions, saving space under the TV set. But I think there's more to it than that. Internet bandwidth looks set to increase continuously, while capacity on EchoStar's satellites appears increasingly constrained. If the Slingbox rebroadcasts any video signal over the Internet, couldn't EchoStar, one day, skip the satellite altogether and pump television programming over the Internet — what's known in the industry as IPTV?

Of course, in IPTV, EchoStar will face competition ranging from AT&T to Microsoft. No small challenge. But Krikorian, the Sling Media founder, has faced unlikely odds in introducing a new, difficult-to-explain piece of hardware, winning critical praise and blog buzz, and now selling his company at a more than healthy price. If he's sincere in staying on at EchoStar, as he told PaidContent, Ergen's company has a chance to transcend its satellite-TV heritage. That seems worth a few hundred million dollars.