"We still have another three to five years of a very disruptive transition," says Dennis A. Miller, a former traditional-media executive who's a general partner at Boston-based Spark Capital. "The new models have not all revealed themselves, and the old models are facing a wave of divestitures in response to the single-digit cash flow march of their core businesses."

Miller's venture capital firm, now in its second year as an early-stage investor, already has taken stakes in a dozen new models that have been revealed. San Diego-based Veoh Networks Inc., which bills itself "the first truly independent Internet Television Broadcasting System," is among them, as is Boulder, Colo.-based Me.dium Inc., a browser application that allows users to locate and communicate with friends and others online in real time.

Most telling, though, is Spark Capital's interest in Next New Networks. This New York-based startup, run by alumni from MTV Networks, Nickelodeon and AOL LLC, is several months into establishing 101 microtelevision networks. Plans call for each of these micronets to deliver three to 11 minutes of targeted video content that's refreshed on a scheduled basis.

The programming idea is not only to move content beyond the repurposing impulses of TV's traditional suppliers, but also to remove much of the chaos that's keeping advertisers away from such viewer-generated repositories as YouTube and MySpace. As for distribution, Next New Networks plays directly into Spark Capital's plan to piggyback on the billions already spent to build out the broadband infrastructure of cable, telecom and wireless.

It goes without saying that so-called old media look askance at enterprises like Spark Capital and Google Inc. -- the latter with a market cap already greater than that of CBS Corp., Time Warner Inc. and Viacom Inc. combined -- for building promising new businesses on the back of their own. Yet, aside from recorded music's turn-of-the-century attack on file-sharing services like Napster Inc., old media have waited until recently to say much themselves.

Thank Viacom's $1 billion complaint against Google's YouTube, filed in March, for ending the silence. The Viacom suit, which promises to redefine (and in many ways define) the open-source intellectual-property relationship, acknowledges that YouTube "purports to be a forum for users to share their own original 'user-generated' video content." But the real "cornerstone" of its business plan, Viacom charges, has been to attract "a library of infringing works to draw traffic to the YouTube site, enabling it to gain a commanding market share, earn significant revenues and increase its enterprise value."

As proof of YouTube's enterprise value, the suit references the $1.65 billion that Google agreed to pay last October to acquire the popular video-sharing site. Much of this takeover price is attributable to what Viacom calls "the unauthorized appropriation and exploitation of copyrighted works belonging to others, especially plaintiffs." Making matters worse, the suit continues, is YouTube's behavior after removing an infringing video at the request of its copyright owner. "YouTube does not even try to block slightly altered copies of the very same video from being uploaded again immediately after being removed," the suit contends.

Although months from trial (the case won't be scheduled until late July), YouTube counters that the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, provides ample protection. But this argument has neither warded off additional infringement claims nor mollified old media. Indeed, at last month's annual National Cable & Telecommunications Association conference, the inherent conflict between new and old media was likened to mortal combat.

After calling Google "the Custer of the modern world," Time Warner chairman and CEO Dick Parsons, sitting on a state-of-the-industry panel with Comcast Corp.'s Brian Roberts, News Corp.'s Peter Chernin and Viacom's Philippe Dauman, compared himself and his fellow media chieftains to the "Sioux Nation." Forget the politically incorrect implications of Parsons' metaphor; the man once regarded as the smoothest operator ever to head a media conglomerate then said of his latter-day Custers: "They will lose this war if they go to war. The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion."

The remark stunned observers, many of whom consider Parsons defensive and disingenuous. "Traditional media have operated in the most belligerent and aggressive ways for 25 years," responds one media veteran. "And now these gatekeepers are going nuts just because YouTube shot a rocket into their pillars."

Another source notes the hypocrisy of Viacom's suit, citing the origins of the entertainment company's MTV division. It began as a cable channel devoted to the rotation of music videos, all produced and donated for broadcast by the major record companies. "Excuse me for asking," he says, "but didn't Viacom turn that into a $10 billion operation by using content it didn't own"?

Most interesting, if not cutting, is the professed confusion of one of the "new kids" whom Parsons' "Sioux Nation" has in its sights: "I can't claim to have studied that period of history well enough to know, really, what Parsons is talking about."

Of course, this sort of ignorance can work both ways. And, according to Blake Warner, a partner and director of Internet and digital media banking at San Francisco-based Thomas Weisel Partners Group Inc., it has in fact been reciprocated -- at least to the extent that old media are late to the new-media party. "The media-consumption patterns of the average board member aren't in alignment with those of younger generations," he says. And while Warner respects the "business judgment and prudence" elder statesmen bring to their boards, he maintains the urgency of executing a digital media plan doesn't take hold until, finally, they grasp new-media consumption patterns. "The reality is that most board members have only recently started reading about such disruptive influences on traditional media as viral marketing, social networking and online casual game playing," he says. "But now that they're aware of these behaviors, what to do about it is suddenly their most pressing issue."

Making it more pressing yet is investor impatience. It has been 16 months since Carl Icahn called for Time Warner to unlock an imputed $40 billion in unrecognized value by splitting itself up. Though the stock has since risen 18%, Bear, Stearns & Co. analyst Spencer Wang is calling for the sale or spinoff of Time Warner's magazine unit. His reason? Time Inc.'s inability to deliver "the kind of growth demanded by public shareholders."

Citigroup Inc. analyst Jeffrey Sprague takes a similar stance with General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal Inc. The GE media and entertainment unit not only "has no meaningful synergy with the rest of the portfolio," Sprague writes in a research note, but its less-than-stellar performance "continues to mute the strong performance in GE's infrastructure businesses."

The downgrading of traditional-media investments by Wall Street is not at all isolated from Viacom's suing Google or even Parsons' name-calling. The three acts taken together suggest that, if nothing else, the stage is set for major convergence-induced upheavals in media ownership. Maybe these upheavals will occur within the remaining three to five years of "disruptive transition" that Spark Capital's Miller envisions, or maybe they won't. Much depends on whether traditional media -- through litigation, intimidation, acquisition and even more technological innovation -- can obtain enough protection or support from new media to get beyond what Miller calls "the single-digit cash flow march" of businesses that served them a lot better in earlier decades.

Recent behavior indicates these traditional companies are intensely, if belatedly, aware that time is running out. But it also suggests they're so stressed that they no longer consider the appropriate response to be fight or flight. It's both.