sells. And many other communication scholars (particularly in the Uses and Gratifications area) figure that watching TV, going to movies and listening to recorded music are all fairly predictable practices once people become accustomed to them. That is, there is a pretty reliable national audience for TV. something like 105 million households. These households (mine included) pretty much turn on the TV at a certain time each day and watch for a certain amount of time. They may flip around to find something they like or they may just have it on in the background while they do other stuff, but the appliance is on regardless of the content. Therefore the real boon is being able to control the pipes that feed into that appliance--especially in commercial TV, where you get points for people having the TV on regardless of if they are making sausage or babies while it flickers behind them. In other words, distribution is more important than production of content because the actual production is of audiences that are sold to advertisers.
[WS:] If memory serves, the uses and gratifications theory goes much further than claiming that "content is irrelevant." I think the crux of their argument is that the contents is pretty much defined by the audience in accordance with their idiosyncratic needs and frames of reference, rather than pre-defined by broadcasters. For example, a propagandistic flick 'reefers madness' intended to evoke negative stereotypes of weed smokers is adopted by weed smoking kids as a 'cult flick' to have a really good laugh at it.
I think that uses & gratifications approach (as I understand it, at least) is a death blow to the cultural imperialism theory and any "hypodermic needle" theory of the media (i.e. claimed strong pre-programmed effect of the media contents). It basically stipulates that the same recorded image played in two different cultural contexts produces two different contents, and consequently, two different works of art.
Wojtek