The ITV Interview with Eric Frankel [PDF link], President of Warner Bros. Domestic Cable Distribution:
[snip]
Frankel: "Yes. First, you need to look at all your rights, program-by-program and episode-by-episode, to see if you have the rights to put it on the Internet.
[snip]
"A couple of years ago, I said, ‘Gee. One of these days, Internet TV is going to happen, and we should try to be the first guys in–or at least one of the first–so that we can control our own destiny by building our own retail store where we can directly sell to consumers, without Wal-Mart or Showtime or Tribune or USA Network getting in the middle and acting as a roadblock.’
So we went out and brought in a bunch of paralegals. We started going through all of our television library. Over the course of a couple of years, we cleared 300-plus television series, and about 14,000 to 15,000 episodes of programming."
[snip]
[itvt]: "And, as a result of the efforts of your team of lawyers and paralegals…
Frankel: "We found 14,000 to 15,000 episodes that didn’t have issues. We had acquired the necessary rights for them either because we were forward-thinking or because people simply gave us those rights."