You could see the lawsuits coming the second Dish Network announced Auto Hop, a feature that allows viewers to skip commercials entirely when they play a program back on their DVRs. Fox Broadcasting Co., CBS and NBCUniversal filed suit today against the satellite TV service, alleging that Dish violated copyrights and breached its retransmission consent agreement with Fox.

The suits were filed in the U.S. District Court for the central district of California.

The networks are seeking injunctive relief and compensatory and statutory damages.

"We were given no choice but to file suit against one of our largest distributors, Dish Network, because of their surprising move to market a product with the clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem. Their wrongheaded decision requires us to take swift action in order to aggressively defent the future of free, over-the-air television," Fox said in a statement.

Fox claims its carriage agreement with Dish does not allow Fox to retransmit in real-time Fox broadcast programming, nor does it allow Dish without a license to make its own copy of programming and distribute a commercial-free version.

CBS is making similar claims. "This service takes existing network content and modifies it in a manner that is unauthorized and illegal. We believe this is a clear violation of copyright law and we intend to stop it," CBS said in a statement.

Coming to Dish's defense, Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group argued that Dish is merely giving consumers more control over their TV.

"This is a frontal assault on home recording and fair use," said Gigi Sohn, the president and CEO of Public Knowledge. "Ordinary consumers are in its crosshairs....In filing this suit, Fox and others are challenging long-held consumer rights and going against long-standing consumer practices."

Chris Matthews must be getting that tingling feeling down his leg again. He and his colleagues may soon have a giant news site to call their own.

That's because NBCUniversal is in serious negotiations with Microsoft to buy back MSNBC.com. Several sources with first-hand knowledge of the situation say that negotiations between the two companies have progressed to the stage where NBCU parent company Comcast is conducting its due diligence. They said that the partnership could be unwound by this summer.

Both the MSNBC network and MSNBC.com were launched as a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft in 1996 during the Web's early emergence as a news vehicle. In 2005, NBC purchased the majority of Microsoft's stake of MSNBC, which has since morphed into a liberal alternative to Fox News, populated by opinionated hosts like Matthews and Rachel Maddow. Two years later, NBC owned the network outright.

But MSNBC.com has remained a joint venture, while maintaining a distinct personality from the network. While the site is populated with Today Show and NBC News content, it's far more of a general news outlet than its TV counterpart.

As recently as two years ago, there were reports that MSNBC.com would rebrand in order to distinguish itself from the cable net's left-wing persona. But apparently, under the Comcast reign, the company is more interested in using MSNBC.com to further its network brand. "It drives those guys crazy that they can't have personalities like Maddow and company on the Web more," said a source. However, most insiders know that MSNBC.com couldn't pull in 55.7 million uniques (comScore, April 2012) with Maddow and Matthews alone. The site benefits heavily from its prominent placement on the MSN portal, and that's something NBCU will be hesitant to give up.

Thus, according to one source, the companies are likely to negotiate a deal ensuring that MSNBC.com secures real estate on MSN.com-similar to the current treatment Fox Sports receives.

It's not clear at the moment what will happen to MSNBC.com's employees. The company has never maintained a large content staff; however, the site's president and CEO, Charlie Tillinghast, is a prominent name in the Web publishing world, having recently served as the chairman of the Online Publishers Association.

Officials from MSNBC.com and NBCU declined to comment.

Back in the old days, i.e., PF&T (pre-Facebook and Twitter), American Idol fans were still social. Yet instead of status updates and tweets, they did what they could with "the technology of those times," explained Don Wilcox, Fox's vp and gm of branded entertainment. That is, if you wanted to debate Justin vs. Kelly, you'd log onto message boards on AmericanIdol.com or, shudder, MySpace "before the exodus," Wilcox joked.

Now, in this social TV era, the aging Idol franchise appears to have pivoted brilliantly. According to the social analytics firm Bluefin Labs, Idol-which wrapped season 11 last night-generated 5,956,134 total social comments, an all-time record in this medium's short history.

That's 121 percent better than NBC's The Voice, which generated 2,698,460 total comments, despite being the newer and arguably far buzzier show this season. During Wednesday's finale, Idol registered 594,469 social mentions per hour.

Of course, Idol also lends itself perfectly to social TV interaction, given its season-long competition and the fact that it airs live. "We've always been about giving fans a voice [no pun intended] and cultivating fervor about the show," said Wilcox. "Last year we really just dipped our toe in social TV, but this year was our first really big push."

While the show's high-profile judges and hosts-like Jennifer Lopez and Ryan Seacrest-periodically mention Idol in their social media comments, the big push for social TV presence came from stunts created for the contestants and their rabid fan bases. Rather than just throwing a hashtag up on the screen occasionally, Idol execs looked to capture moments in the show that lent themselves to channel social media activity.

"Our social presence used to be purely digital," said Wilcox. "This year we used TV to prompt audiences." For example, during the show, Seacrest periodically urged fans to tweet to #MyIdol to declare their favorite singers, or tweet at #idolbackstage to unlock exclusive content on AmericanIdol.com (once 10,000 fans joined in). "Our intent was to prompt audiences. There were times when we literally clogged up Twitter," said Wilcox.

While Twitter served as the show's real-time commenting vehicle, Facebook often took on the role of a gathering place for the show's 9 million or so viewers.

The show also implemented Facebook's Open Graph, enabling automatic sharing whenever fans commented or voted on the show. "That really accelerated things," said Wilcox.

Perhaps no exchange more efficiently lays bare the unsentimental heart of the TV business quite like the back-and-forth between Jules and Vincent at the beginning of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. As the two hit men are on their way to make a collection, Jules reveals that their boss' wife, Mia Wallace, once starred in a pilot.

Because Vincent's pop culture appreciation seems to have died out with Mamie Van Doren-"I don't watch TV," he says-Jules finds himself defining the term "pilot" for his dopey, dope-addled partner.

"Well, the way they pick TV shows is, they make one show. That show's called a ‘pilot,'" Jules explains. "Then they show that one show to the people who pick shows, and on the strength of that one show they decide if they want to make more shows. Some get chosen and become television programs. Some don't, become nothing. She starred in one of the ones that became nothing."

This year, another 53 pilots joined Mia Wallace's doomed Fox Force Five in the dustbin of TV history, a roster that includes a number of high-profile flameouts. What follows is a list of some of the more promising concepts that won't be appearing on a TV set near you this fall.

Downwardly Mobile, NBC (Twentieth Century Fox Television)

Roseanne Barr

A multicamera family comedy starring Roseanne Barr as the soulful, sassy proprietor of a trailer park, this comeback attempt would have reunited Barr and John Goodman for the first time since 1997. Unfortunately for fans of Roseanne-and there were an awful lot of them; at its peak, the show averaged 21.5 million households-test audiences did not respond well to Downwardly Mobile's brassy blue-collar comedic sensibility.

Super Fun Night, CBS (Warner Bros. Television)

Rebel Wilson

Conan O'Brien was an executive producer on this loopy comedy starring Bridesmaids scenery chewer Rebel Wilson. The Aussie comic wrote and created this multicamera sitcom about three girlfriends who dedicate their Friday nights to the never-ending pursuit of a "funcomfortable" good time. Jenny Slate of SNL/Marcel the Shell fame was set to play one of the female leads. (While CBS passed on the show, Warner Bros. is shopping Super Fun Night elsewhere, with an eye toward earning a spot on a basic-cable network.)

The Manzanis, ABC (ABC Studios)

Kirstie Alley

Yet another multicamera comedy, the script for this shrill sendup about a squabbling family that disrupts a quiet, WASPy New Jersey neighborhood reads like a primer on the most offensive Italian-American stereotypes. Former Cheers co-stars Kirstie Alley and Rhea Perlman were set to headline, and while poor testing put the kibosh on any hope of a series pickup, at least one Twitter account is trying to convince ABC to change its mind.

Susan 313, NBC (Twentieth Century Fox Television)

Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman wrote, starred and served as co-executive producer on this apparently autobiographical single-camera comedy about a woman struggling to return to her old life after a particularly tough breakup. The pilot was backed by serious muscle (Brian Grazer and Ron Howard), and Silverman is a popular stand-up comedian and performer. Still, her sensibility is rather raunchy for prime time-Silverman has made a cottage industry out of vagina jokes, so much so that Whitney Cummings should cut her a hefty royalty check-and the networks also tend to steer clear of comics who traffic in political material. Ultimately, the decision to pass on Susan 313 simply may have come down to NBC reversing course on its female-centric comedy strategy. After premiering Whitney; Up All Night; Bent; Are You There, Chelsea?; and Best Friends Forever in 2011-12, NBC elected to go with a broad slate of family comedies (Men With Kids, The New Normal), workplace sitcoms (Animal Practice, Next Caller) and the Matthew Perry comeback vehicle, Go On.

Friday Night Dinner, NBC (NBC Universal Television)

Allison Janney

Based on a popular U.K. series, Friday Night Dinner was to have paired off the great Allison Janney and Tony Shalhoub as the parents of two unmarried adult sons who come home for Shabbat dinner every Friday. The homegrown adaptation was executive produced by Greg Daniels (The Office). Despite unspectacular testing, Friday Night Dinner is said to have been in contention for a series pickup until just before the network's May 14 upfront presentation.

The Flintstones, Fox (Twentieth Century Fox Television)

Seth McFarlane and The Flintstones

Announced during last year's upfront show, Seth MacFarlane's reboot of the classic "modern Stone-Age family" cartoon appears to have been put on ice, indefinitely. The Flintstones would have been the Family Guy creator's fourth animated series on Fox, but network entertainment president Kevin Reilly wasn't blown away by MacFarlane's first draft. Rather than knock out another script, MacFarlane elected to give up on the project altogether. Good news for Flintstones purists who greeted news of the remake with a hearty "Yabba Dabba Don't!"

Untitled Louis C.K./Spike Feresten Project, CBS (CBS Television Studios)

Louie C.K.

As fans of his FX series Louie can attest, Louis C.K. is the smartest, darkest comedian alive, a T-shirt-clad existentialist who has more bracing insights about capital-D Death than Woody Allen and Norm MacDonald combined, yet can evoke a sense of hard-won joy with a simple dick joke. Every year he tosses out his material to start from scratch, and while this act of forced renewal carries a whiff of fanaticism, damn it if he doesn't pull it off. He's also figured out the digital-distribution conundrum, raking in some $1.1 million on $5 downloads of his 2011 comedy special, Live at the Beacon Theater. How anyone thought Louis C.K. would find a home on broadcast TV (and on CBS, no less, home to lowest common denominator fare like Two and a Half Men and 2 Broke Girls) remains a puzzle for the ages, but this pilot never really had much of a shot.

Living Loaded, Fox (FX Productions)

Charlie Day

Based on a book by booze columnist Dan Dunn, Living Loaded was executive produced by the three creators of the FX comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton. This single-camera comedy about a bibulous blogger (the character literally drinks for a living) who tries to clean up his act so he can co-host a radio show at his father's NPR affiliate would have starred Mike Vogel and Donald Sutherland. Fox instead elected to go with the female-targeted Mindy Project, which will be paired with New Girl, and the family comedy Ben & Kate. Incidentally, this was the second broadcast pilot the Always Sunny trio worked on together; in 2009, Fox shot down their outer-space comedy Boldly Going Nowhere.

Devious Maids, ABC (ABC Studios)

Eva Longoria

A sudsy drama series based on the Televisa telenovela format The Disorderly Maids of the Neighborhood, this was to have been Marc Cherry's successor to ABC linchpin Desperate Housewives. ABC cooled on the project after screening the pilot, and some observers said Devious Maids' chances weren't helped by the timing of the Nicollette Sheridan court case. (The selection process coincided with Sheridan's testimony in her $20 million lawsuit against Cherry for assault and wrongful termination.) Thus far, Cherry pilots are batting .000; while Desperate Housewives earned him a long-term development deal with ABC, the network also passed on his 2011 pilot, Hallelujah.

Rebounding, Fox (Twentieth Century Fox Television)

Will Forte

A late spec script buy starring Will Forte as a guy recovering from the death of his fiancée with the support of his basketball buddies, Rebounding was hampered by a very tricky premise. (Dead fiancées are comedy killers.) Sure, the opportunity to watch Forte in a lead would have been tremendous-he even made the anvil-headed feature film MacGruber somewhat watchable, and he's long been the funniest guest character on 30 Rock-but even with Modern Family's Steven Levitan aboard as an executive producer, the script was a little light on laughs. Still, the pilot tested through the roof (Forte earned particularly high marks) and Rebounding had a shot at a series pickup right up until the week before Fox's May 14 upfront presentation. Ultimately, the network decided to commit to the aforementioned live-action comedies Ben & Kate and The Mindy Project.

Viacom has increased its shareholder dividend to 27.5 cents, up 10 percent. The increase takes place starting with Viacom's next quarterly dividend, payable July 2.

The media conglomerate has driven up the share price in recent months as its stock buy-back program continues apace. Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman said in a statement that "consistently strong cash flows and a solid balance sheet" contributed to the decision to bump up the dividend; part of that may have to do with the company's resolution of an ongoing dispute with New York-based cable giant Time Warner Cable.

Last week, the two companies issued a joint statement saying that they had privately settled the legal fight over who had the rights to stream Viacom content like shows from Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and MTV on the iPad. "Neither side is conceding its original legal position or will have further comment," the statement said, but with the deadlock broken, verified Time Warner customers have access to plenty of Viacom content.

Still, the increase was smaller than some analysts had predicted (analysts at financial news outlet Bloomberg predicted a bump up to 30 cents).

MSOs like Time Warner have featured prominently in Viacom's current business successes-the company's first-quarter earnings report proclaimed a 56 percent boost to $585 million, and much of the increase was due to a 15 percent spike in affiliate fees payed by satellite and cable operators like Time Warner. Ad sales increased 1 percent (likely due to continuing sluggishness at Nickeolodeon), and the coming upfront season is likely to help Viacom pick some but not all of the slack in that area-Comedy Central is predicted by SNL Kagan to get a 6.2 percent increase in ad revenue, with a 5.9 percent uptick prognoticated for MTV.

James Lipton is a national treasure, damn it, but the erudite TV host gets precious little respect-or promotion-from his own network. Until now. Lipton lines up his first cameo in Bravo's splashy summer ads, alongside such basic-cable luminaries as Zoila the maid from Flipping Out and Giggy the Pom from Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Lipton is a Bravo-lebrity! Finally! He must be sleeping like a baby these days! Elsewhere in the Olympic-themed promo, launching Wednesday night and airing for the next few months, Housewives toss cocktails, but oddly, not at each other, and Top Chef's Tom Colicchio stuffs his face. Andy Cohen nearly goes up in flames-insert whatever joke comes to mind here-and Jeff Lewis gets punked, all to the strains of Madonna's new single, "Superstar." The work, the third summer promo in a row for Bravo's escapist fare, comes from Los Angeles agency Stun Creative, where letting Kathy Griffin run mischievously wild and fixing a race for NeNe Leakes is the first order of business.

Arianna Huffington and Oprah Winfrey are forging a new friendship, intended to share the talk show queen's health-and-happiness mantra with the vast network of Huffington Post readers and bloggers.

Come August, the Huffington Post Media Group will publish Oprah Winfrey Network-curated content in a special website section and provide a forum for HuffPost's vast network of bloggers to dialogue about it.

The new section will contain a mix of articles, blogs and interactive content to connect the HuffPost audience on an "emotional and spiritual level," the company said in a statement. Specifically, it will provide advice and resources focused on personal growth, spirituality and aspects of physical and mental health.

"Oprah was about engagement and authenticity long before engagement and authenticity ruled the Web," Huffington Post Media Group president and CEO Huffington said in a statement. "I'm delighted that we'll be working together to enlarge the conversation on living our best lives, as Oprah puts it."

Broadcasters will face off with pay TV upstart Aereo next week over claims that Aereo is retransmitting TV signals without permission in violation of the U.S. Copyright Act.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York will hear arguments May 30 from two separate cases from two groups of network TV station owners that filed against Aereo prior to the service's March launch in New York City. They have asked for a preliminary injunction to halt the service.

Aereo uses tiny antennas the size of a dime to pull down local TV station signals and deliver them over the Internet. The company argues it doesn't have to comply with the copyright law because it is leasing an antenna (albeit a tiny one) to consumers.

Because the service is backed by the IAC's Barry Diller, a former network executive, it has drawn a lot of attention. Diller recently defended the service before a Senate Commerce hearing on the future of video.

One of the claims of unfair competition filed by a group of broadcaster companies that includes News Corp. and PBS was dismissed Monday by Judge Alison Nathan. Nathan dismissed the claim because it was inconsistent with the copyright claim.

Privately, broadcasters don't seem worried, brushing off the setback as small. "Copyright has always been the main claim, so it's not a big loss," said one broadcast exec who requested anonymity.

If Aereo prevails, it could upend a a well-entrenched business model where cable and satellite TV services must negotiate retransmission consent agreements with TV owners and pay a fee to carry station programming. Such retransmission consent fees have grown to be a lucrative revenue stream for TV owners.

Broadcasters will argue that Aereo is not only retransmitting the TV signals without a copyright license, it is also illegally copying the programming to transmit it over the Internet.

Aereo's argument will depend on whether the court buys the company's argument that it is merely leasing equipment and not retransmitting broadcast signals.

"We think it's more likely the broadcasters will win their case than lose," wrote David Bank, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, based on his conversations with legal experts. "While we think there is a less than 50 percent chance that Aereo will win this case, we think it is quite likely that the injunction could be rejected.

A ruling on the injunction based on Monday's arguments could come as soon as June, but the trial could drag on for months.

While broadcasters ponder the outcome of their case against Aereo, they are also considering taking to court another new service, Dish Network's Auto Hop, which (gasp) allows viewers to completely skip commercials. If a service like that catches on, it could also change broadcast TV business models, forcing broadcasters to find other ways to pay for TV programming, including charging higher carriage fees to pay TV services.

The E.W. Scripps Company is entering the risky syndicated TV market with two new programs: Let's Ask America and The List, a game show and a news magazine, respectively. From the descriptions provided by the company, both sound like they're aimed at the TMZ demographic-presumably to offset the inherent risk in entering the weak syndie market amid all the other would-be Oprahs set to vie for the Queen of Talk's throne this fall.

The shows will launch in seven markets, including Cleveland and Cincinnati.

Let's Ask America is produced by Telepictures and paraMedia and distributed by Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution; Warner Bros. international TV production will distribute the format overseas, so if the show is a hit, look for Let's Ask Mauritius before too long. The trivia show will ask viewers at home to answer questions about current events, while The List will provide the day's news in list format. Content comes from "national and local vloggers," journalists and experts as well as the D.C.-based Scripps investigative unit.

Let's Ask America is produced by TMZ's Jim Paratore; The List has Entertainment Tonight producer and TMZ.com competitor HollywoodIntel.com creator Rick Joyce at the helm.