If there was an "Old Media Doomsday Clock" marking the end of broadcast TV, it would have ticked another minute or so closer to midnight last week when ABC revealed that its online video service had served up episodes to over 3 million viewers in its first two weeks of operation.

Viewers wanting to see shows like "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" can log on to ABC's site and sit through a 10-second commercial (and several commercial breaks throughout the show) if they want to catch up on episodes they missed. It's quick and easy, and seems relatively flawless (with the exception of some server blips when the service first went online).

ABC isn't the first network to do this, though they are one of the first to offer full versions of popular shows. Nickelodeon's been doing it for a while and Discovery recently announced that they'd get in the game soon. Comedy Central's been playing with shorts for a while now, and the growing popularity of Google Video and YouTube has been bolstered in large part by the commercial content they carry.

Now, 3 million views isn't even close to the current television penetration, which is 90 percent of all U.S. adults. But still … it's 3 million people. And that's just after two weeks of operation. Regardless of the immediate threat to the current broadcast models, the traffic shows pretty clearly that given the choice people will go online to watch television.

ABC's move to embrace the new media delivery paradigms is pretty smart and has left the other networks to play catch-up. But it's not just the networks that are starting to get nervous.

Big advertisers are starting to step back and re-evaluate their old-school media strategies. Johnson and Johnson, one of television's biggest advertisers, has decided not to participate in the pre-sale "upfront market" this season, and other big advertisers like Coca Cola are thinking about following suit.

Ostensibly J&J is pulling out because they "want to do deals on their own timetable." But it's not hard to see how the plethora of media options out there is making it tougher and tougher for advertisers to put their dollars in traditional advertising.

Analysts predict that global online advertising spending will reach as high as $55 billion by 2010 (a number I think is actually a little low). So not only is more money going to be spent, but based on the tracking and measurement capabilities of the Internet, it'll probably be spent a lot smarter, too—a very attractive prospect for ROI-conscious advertisers.

Of course, no matter what happens, television and radio aren't going away. Even if CBS discovers that the portable people meters they're about to deploy report that nobody's actually listening to the radio, low-end media will still hang on to its legacy for a long time to come.

But as far as where things are going, there's no question that the future's online. Sure, the TV industry might start playing with "interactive" commercials via Digital Television and TiVo-like "commercials on demand," but these are merely stopgap measures.

Looking at the plans online media giants like Yahoo are trotting out should be enough to convince even the most hardened skeptic that the possibilities online media offers with flexible, on-demand delivery options, the ability to provide media across a huge range of devices, interactivity, measurement, campaign integration and the sheer range of creative options available make a package far too attractive for advertisers to resist over the long term. Just take a gander at my colleague Stephen Bryant's column on ABC's "Lost" if you're looking for examples of how the new world of television plus online can work.

So 3 million? Maybe not such a big dent in the overall television viewing audience. But it's a pretty impressive start. I'm moving the Old Media Doomsday Clock one tick closer to midnight.

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