The economics of TV production are silly. You pay people several hundreds of thousands of pounds to do some acting, you pay hundreds of thousands for a format, millions to produce a show and it's seen once by a few tens of millions of people and then decays like carbon until it becomes totally commoditised.
Brilliant shows like Rubicon and Deadwood get tossed away because they somehow don't make the bar for the US domestic market, despite massive overseas and DVD sales.
However, internationally, there are more modest productions that are huge successes, such as The Killing form Denmark, Spiral from France and Wallander from Sweden (and OK, this is just the cop TV genre).
If ever there was a market that demanded a marketplace, it is TV. What do I mean by this ? Well, there seems to be a true disconnect between the views of channel and service operators and what the public actually want. This is the niche that companies such as Netflix and Lovefilm/Amazon are plying, and where Blinkbox/Tesco and Seesaw in the UK want to play, albeit they are largely using cinematic release windows as their core business propositions.
YouTube would love to be 'second chance to see TV', but no one trusts them. So who will fill this niche?