My hope is that "New Media" solves this. I mean, just look what it's done for comics. For decades, newspapers shrunk the size of the funny pages, placing ever-more-restrictive stipulations on the formatting of the content. Innovative new strips rarely got a foothold. Old strips that died off weren't replaced with new; old strips that stagnated weren't replaced with new; and now the newspaper funny pages are a wasteland.
Now, the Internet is the place to go for comics. There is no restriction on format, content, schedule, or even on who gets published. My RSS reader gives me a daily "funny page" far better than I ever got from any newspaper. I can only imagine what Calvin and Hobbes would have looked like as a webcomic...
Of course, video takes a lot more resources than comics. One man can't very well create an entire production, as is the case with most comics. The closest I can think of are the Chapman brothers' Homestar Runner, but voice actors that can voice a dozen characters are fairly rare.
That said, the pattern of new media has been for budgets to shrink and teams to become leaner. The fat gets cut, middlemen disappear, and the content...actually gets better. I can see nothing that suggests it can't happen for television.
