(FORTUNE Magazine) – With the broadcast networks losing market share and making slim profits, you'd think they'd be focused on creating new hits. Alas, programming a TV network in a world of clashing media titans isn't that simple.

Last month ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, UPN, and the WB unveiled their fall lineups to advertisers, which will spend about $6.5 billion to buy time before the new season begins. If most of the 25 new programs fail--and they will--here's one reason: Network programmers had more on their minds than merely bringing in viewers and, you know, entertaining them.

What has muddied up the schedule making is the networks' desire to own more of the programs they air. This makes sense for cash-strapped broadcasters, to a point. If a network owns a hit, it shares in revenues when reruns are sold to local stations or cable. Ownership also means the networks can't be held hostage by the Hollywood studios when the studios control the hits. (NBC had to pay Warner Bros. $13 million per episode to renew ER, turning TV's top-rated show into a loss leader for the Peacock.) The Big Four have been pushing so hard for ownership that this fall, for the first time, they will completely or partially own most of the weekly series they air.

The trouble is, the networks may be getting too greedy for their own good. CBS will own a stake in each of its six new fall shows, suggesting that those not willing to share a piece of the action need not apply. Disney-owned ABC sought not only equity stakes but also the right to broadcast shows up to four times, eroding their value in the rerun market. In both regards, ABC is borrowing from the business models of profitable cable networks, which own most of their content and repeat shows at will. Since TV production studios couldn't exist without the networks, the studios must adapt to new models or "they're going to kill the golden goose," says Pat Fili-Krushel, president of the ABC network.

ABC's most brazen move came just before it set its schedule, when it offered Warner Bros. a choice time slot, Wednesday at 9:30 p.m., for a sitcom called The Norm Show, in exchange for a 10% ownership stake and multiple repeats. (Warner is a unit of Time Warner, FORTUNE's parent.) A similar offer was made to Twentieth Century Fox for a pilot called Then Came You. That was unusual; networks typically take ownership only in shows they help develop. Warner Bros. Chairman Bob Daly was incensed at Disney CEO Michael Eisner; although contrary to industry gossip, it does not appear that Daly used Warner's WB network to retaliate by rejecting a couple of Disney-owned shows. But when Warner's and Twentieth rejected ABC's terms, ABC awarded the time slot to a pilot called (fittingly) Oh Grow Up, whose owners yielded to the network. Fili-Krushel denies that dealmaking drove ABC's decisions. "The first priority is the quality of our shows," she says.

The networks' long-term health depends on their remaining mass media with advertiser appeal. Media buyer John Rash of the Minneapolis ad agency Campbell Mithun Esty says, "The viewers want a good laugh, a heart-tugging drama, or an insightful news magazine. Those should be the dynamics that drive scheduling." It's also self-defeating when networks waste their most valuable time slots on second-rate shows they own, as NBC did with The Single Guy and Union Square.

Interestingly, NBC now seems to have backed away from an insistence on owning the shows it airs. It owns only two of its seven new shows for the fall. Scott Sassa, president of NBC West Coast, says, "Whatever money we make potentially in syndication pales beside what you can make by having the best possible schedule on the air." NBC's new programmer, Garth Ancier, agrees; he comes from the WB, which has refused to favor its sibling Warner Bros. television studio. This anti-synergy has served the WB well; it was the only broadcaster to increase its ratings this season.

--Marc Gunther