CHICAGO -- Leverage is not what it used to be for media and entertainment companies swept up in the digital broadband revolution, as witnessed by the complex changes afoot in valuing television content supply and demand.

With television's traditional food chain being shaken to its core by technological innovations, industry players on both sides of the content equation are groping for ways to use technology-driven changes to their advantage. But getting there means sifting through some fairly weighty questions that have no easy answers and rewriting the status quo.

For instance, in a marketplace being driven by empowered consumers, whose demands and habits already are altering industry economics, how much leverage will broadcasters and cable networks continue to have to command cash retransmission fees and carriage for new program services? And what will that do, in turn, to their established business relations with program producers and advertisers?

How much economic disruption will occur as a result of the deterioration of allegiances that used to assure financial security for broadcast networks and their TV station affiliates, between broadcast and cable operations owned by the same media conglomerate, between program networks and advertisers, and programrs and consumers?

What new content production and distribution options will offset the weakening traditional financial metrics with, perhaps, more lucrative and reliable revenue streams?

Over the next five years, we will begin to know the answers as many of the licensing agreements with major distributors held by News Corp.'s Fox Entertainment Group and Viacom's CBS Corp. expire and are renegotiated according to a new set of economic and technology considerations.

Some of the restrictive terms Fox agreed to in order to acquire a controlling stake in DirecTV a year ago will have run out by then, and Fox will be negotiating for carriage of its broadcast and cable networks with the full alternative force of its DirecTV satellite operations behind it. So it would not be surprising if, between now and then, rival satellite TV player EchoStar was likewise snatched up by the corporate parents of CBS, NBC or ABC in a similar defense play, analysts say.

Over the next five years, Viacom's soon-to-be-spun-off CBS Corp. will have been operating as a pure-play broadcaster that will have to find new ways of using its traditional ratings and content as a springboard to generate new revenue. It is not inconceivable that CBS could launch a branded companion 24-hour cable network to its recently announced 24-hour Internet news service. It could then leverage its customized news content across cable, cell phone, Internet and other new tech platforms in retransmission negotiations with cable, satellite and other distributors in exchange for cash and carriage assurances for its new branded products.

Because of its pending spinoff, CBS Corp. will be in a position, like Fox, of providing some groundbreaking ways to revalue content creation, supply and demand for the industry.

But in the interim, the leverage of such smaller broadcasters as Sinclair Broadcast Group, Emmis Broadcasting and Nexstar is being challenged as they join CBS' campaign for cash payments for the right of cable and satellite operators to transmit their local signals. So far, the battle is not going well. Where Nexstar has pulled the plug on its own NBC, CBS and ABC affiliates in markets in Texas and Missouri over resistance to being paid cash for the signals, the small, gutsy broadcaster has lost advertising revenue faster and more severely than the local cable operators involved have lost subscribers. Clearly, as cash for carriage becomes an industry standard, it won't be evenly or always applied.

As Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett pointed out in a recent report, telephone companies rushing to protect their access lines by offering bundled video and data might have little alternative but to pay up for local and network broadcast signals, but it won't make or break broadcasting.

In a world of diffused content offerings and fragmented viewing, the onus is on network-affiliated broadcasters to innovate and produce unique content from their local resources and connections that cable, satellite and other distributors will want enough to pay for. They can only partially rely on the appeal of broadcast- and cable-network generated programs on a fading promise of exclusivity.

Only a few years ago, as network cash compensation payments were slipping away, broadcast network affiliates were fussing over the rebroadcast of some primetime programming on cable networks owned by their corporate parents. That practice is now not only commonplace but also necessary in order for networks to generate the ratings and advertising in multiple places that they used to be able to generate one time on their own air. That's how fast things are changing.

"At the end of the day, carriage fees come down to who can cause whom the most pain," though the balance of power between content and distribution is becoming more complex daily, Moffett said.

But with television becoming only one, albeit important, spoke in the multimedia wheel, broadcast and cable players are beginning to see the possibilities for leveraging the value of their content elsewhere. They must.

For the first time, consumer consumption of all television is expected to decline over the next five years by about 0.8%, compared with a forecasted 7% growth in consumer consumption of the Internet because of broadband migration, Bernstein said. Consumer and advertiser spending trends on old vs. new media will look the same.

The one factor muting that gloomy prediction is the willingness and adeptness of legacy companies (such as Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS and their parent companies) to leverage what they do best in new higher-growth areas. There have been encouraging signs, led by News Corp.'s $2 billion Internet spending spree, that these media giants are heightening their commitment to translating their must-have content to all digital wireless broadband platforms. Video games, cell phones and streaming Internet sites are part of the new lucrative syndication frontier, as long as they are willing to play by new rules.

Just last week, Walt Disney Co. CEO-elect Robert Iger had the courage to state the obvious.

"We have to truly look more aggressively at (exhibition) window changes ... not only for the studio business but for the TV business. The notion that a product airs on a television network and remains exclusive, in effect, until its rerun airs some six months later, is just one example of what has to change from a windowing perspective," Iger said. "We can't stand in the way, and we can't allow tradition to stand in the way, of where consumers can go or want to go."

In a world in which consumers can increasingly access precisely what they want, on the device and in the location they chose, for the price they want to pay, the ability to use, repackage and market content to meet users' higher customization, personalization and functionality standards gets you a lucrative seat at the big table. But playing that game means changing relationships at every level of the media and entertainment supply and demand food chain -- from content distributors, providers and producers, as well as advertisers and marketers.

It won't be long before more timely release of popular television fare on DVDs or in a downloadable form on a digital broadband platform -- closer to the time of the programs' initial air on broadcast or cable -- becomes an important revenue stream that could hit $6 billion by 2008, analysts say.

The media executives I frequently talk to confide that they don't quite know how to account for all the new-media spending and revenue generation as they draft and sign off on their 2005 budgets and three-year plans.

But the one thing that can count on -- and that they are obviously banking on -- is the working principle that has endured all media change so far: Where good content goes, consumers and advertisers surely follow, and that dictates a premium value.