Some execs in the music industry might not approve of YouTube as a content distribution channel, but for a growing number of TV execs, it's becoming a must for their business.

Speaking at the Future of Television Forum at New York University's Stern School of Business, David Poltrack, CBS's chief research officer, said YouTube hasn't affected his network's programming and CBS does not want to remove content from the site, Ad Age reports. "When you have something the public really wants, the economic value in that is to come up with a way to satisfy the rights holders and serve the consumers," Poltrack is quoted as saying.

The logic seems to completely fly in the face of the music industry's stance, which has long attempted to monetize any form of music distribution, to the point of pursuing litigation against its own customers. Poltrack's view is to instead discover the distribution channels that the consumer is most comfortable with, and monetize their behavior by giving them a better experience.

"If they're [consumers] going to steal it, give it to them anyway," he said. "But also make it easier to access and present it better than YouTube or BitTorrent or anywhere else."

And while consumers are enjoying having more control than ever over how they consume TV programming, Albert Cheng, EVP of digital media at Disney-ABC Television Group, doesn't see the traditional livingroom as a setting for viewing to disappear anytime soon. "You wouldn't want to watch 'Lost' broken into 50 pieces," Cheng said. "There's just more different-use cases that are allowing users to control how they watch content."