As I look back at the posts TV Squad did this year, a certain topic popped up quite a bit: "Hey, folks, take a look at [Name of big star] in this [funny/quirky/dramatic] web series you can only find at [Name of web site]!" While the quality of and star power behind web-exclusive programming has been building for a couple of years now, 2008 saw an explosion of web series that attracted enough buzz to make one wonder if Jeff Zucker wasn't thinking of this a little bit when he offered Jay Leno the 10:00 slot on NBC.

What caused this explosion? Well, we can thank one of 2008's other big stories -- the writers' strike -- for a lot of it.

Time Warner will soon be offering its users a way to stream Internet video to their television screens as part of an overall home networking system. In short, Time Warner is getting into the same business that Apple TV has already gotten into long ago.

"We're actually going to have equipment we make available to subscribers," said Chief Executive Glenn Brit at the Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York this past Friday. "It's actually going to be a new wireless cable modem that will allow you to network everything in your house."