Cross-platform media strategist Gavin McGarry has a thought for producers and broadcasters: maybe TV programs aren’t meant for the Internet after all.

This perspective may surprise the likes of CTVglobemedia and Canwest, which have taken years to negotiate online rights for U.S. shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and 24. But McGarry, head of startup Jumpwire Media, says audience expectation on the web is fundamentally different.

He gives the example of feature-length French eco-documentary Home, which can be seen in its entirety on its own YouTube channel. ‘I did not watch more than a minute and a half,’ says McGarry, on the phone from his current New York base. ‘It was a long-form project designed for TV and they dumped it on the web.

‘This is the debate we need to have: there is a different type of storytelling and narrative for the web. People will just not wait. Everything’s been accelerated.’

Maybe audiences share his opinion, but it’s hard to tell. Home has received more than four million YouTube views for its various versions in different languages. The question, then, is just how long must a visitor watch for a view to be counted? Did those viewers watch at least half the film, or did most bail after 90 seconds like McGarry? A spokesperson for the Google-owned YouTube will only tell Playback that the site does not disclose information about its view counts.

McGarry suggests broadcast shows stick to the delivery mechanism for which they were intended. ‘[TV producers] should have a website for their show, but what they really do is television. Why don’t they just get better at doing that?’ he asks.

His point of view is a bit of a throwback. While thousands of TV shows have cropped up online in the past few years via iTunes, Hulu and broadcaster websites – not to mention rampant peer-to-peer distribution – he sees the value of the web to TV as largely promotional.

Take Late Show with David Letterman, the durable talk show that has aired on CBS since 1993, and which got a 5% ratings boost after the Eye Network began uploading highlight clips to YouTube in 2006, surprising even network execs. In a joint release, both CBS and YouTube attributed the TV show’s 200,000 new viewers largely to the postings. McGarry believes it.

‘I hadn’t watched Letterman in five years, and then I watched the [09/28/07] Paris Hilton interview and a couple of other things on YouTube, and I’m like ‘Hey, this guy is still funny,’ and I actually did go and watch his show again,’ he says.

More viewers mean more advertisers, higher ad rates and greater revenue, and generating revenue through online is precisely the focus of Jumpwire, which counts Discovery Channel among its clients.

In terms of making money off the web, McGarry tells his clients, ‘We can help you do that, but it’s not going to happen tomorrow.’ The three areas on which he focuses are web video, social media, and mobile.

While media companies continue to struggle with monetizing webisodes, McGarry pushes the ‘freemium’ subscription model. Popular in the porn and casual gaming industries, it sees some video content made available to visitors for free, with upgraded content coming at a cost.

But this model applies more to web-specific producers than to TV broadcasters. Despite his personal protestations, if more TV shows are going to migrate to the web, McGarry sees that happening through cable and satellite companies making programs available online to their regular subscribers. Plans for such services are already in the works in the U.S. and Canada.

McGarry says that those that will profit from the web will have to think outside of the box – right outside of their PCs, in fact.

He points to developments in the music business. It used to be that performers toured mostly to move copies of their new album. But with all the file-sharing that goes on, the Internet has devalued recorded music. Now a new CD release serves mostly to promote the tour.

‘I ask a lot of my clients: ‘Is there some way that you can drive people to the turnstile, so that you can get real people through the door and get them paying?” McGarry says.

The challenge for the audiovisual industry, then, is to find its equivalent of the concert ticket. In a presentation entitled Content Disruption and How to Profit from It that McGarry delivered at the recent Banff fest, he provided the example of Fred, a series of three-minute webisodes featuring teenage Nebraskan Lucas Cruikshank acting as a six-year-old recording his regular activities.

A true phenom among teenagers, the Fred YouTube channel has more than 1.2 million subscribers – making it the site’s all-time leader – and some of the clips have recorded up to 27 million views. McGarry tried to entice the producers to bring the property over to Joost when he worked there.

Although money was slow in coming to the Fred producers, they saw ad-sharing dollars with YouTube and product placement deals adding up to 2008 revenues in the six figures, according to Business Week. And they’ve set up their own website.

McGarry asked Cruikshank’s agent what they were going to do on the site. ”We’re just going to sell T-shirts,” he recalls being told. ‘And now they’re making a fortune.’