Watching on-demand television is one of the best things about having to spend a weekend at your parents house without Internet access. While more and more young people are turning off the TV and turning on the computer, the rise in Internet video popularity has increased hundred fold. Four years ago Google wasn't mainstream enough to warrant a spot covering the DNC, and YouTube hadn't even been invented yet. This year, both owned at the convention, offering bloggers a safe haven to eat and watch episodes of Weeds between keynote speeches. Not to mention the Google/Vanity Fair sponsored after-party.

In an effort to to draw users back to the boob-tube, six companies that make up Canoe Ventures (including Comcast, Time Warner, and Cablevision, among others) have partnered up to offer advertisers a special something: Election '08 On Demand, an "experimental political channel" that in theory allows viewers to watch political coverage, campaign ads, or analyst commentary whenever they want. You know, just like YouTube already does.

The only problem? No one is watching:

500,000 segments has been viewed for the station, which is pretty dismal (the first four nights of the Olympics garnered NBC 30 million viewers) for a channel that launched eight months ago. Then again, Election '08 is pretty well hidden for the basic cable viewer, "On Time Warner, for example, it is Channel 1279; on Cablevision, Channel 500." Channel 1279 is astronomically high up there considering stations like Comedy Central never run above the 50s, and Fox News is invariably found on channels 3-5.

So chalk one up for another internet victory? Not quite; while 500,000 views is bad news for most network stations, it's a huge success by internet standards. The whine-tastic Quarterlife encountered a similar problem when it tried to make the jump from webisodes to cable: How do two different forms of media compete when they measure success by different numbers? Advertisers looking to buy time during political coverage (of which there are few, and include Texas billionaire Boone Pickens advertising wind energy, to give you an idea of how randomly generated this station seems to be) still might be advised to go over to television as opposed to Internet, because no one has been able to figure out how much money a second is worth on the Internet. YouTube just began offering a way for its users to make money, and the field of ad marketing on video websites is still a burgeoning development, more of an art than a science.

And as one media firm puts it, "It’s not quite the same environment looking at your home computer as it is looking at a 50-inch screen.”