The internet was supposed to give us amazing new forms of media like real-time reality television, mass pirate radio, and viewer-generated documentaries. But today it looks like our online future, at least in the near-term, has a whole lot more to do with re-transmitting old media than with creating new content.

For examples, look no further than two big stories from Monday's tech news. There’s the start-up TuneIn, which announced it has 40 million users for an app that takes terrestrial radio and streams it to smartphones. And then there’s Barry Diller’s Aereo, which is celebrating a court decision that will allow it, for now, to continue recording and streaming local television stations over the internet. The logic behind that ruling is depressingly old school: Because Aereo has a separate, miniature antenna for each subscriber, it is more like a signal amplification service than a content creator or even aggregator.

Dumping existing media onto the internet might not seem particularly innovative, but it’s attracted big bets. Diller put $20.5 million into Aereo, while TuneIn recently closed a $16 million round from investors like Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures. And they’re hardly the only start-ups relying on old media, just the least additive. TuneIn’s competitors Pandora and Spotify and Aereo’s competitors Netflix and Amazon Instant Video all traffic in mostly old-line content, albeit with much more innovative repackaging.

These online plays turn to old media companies for content, with few exceptions, because broadcast and cable giants – plodding though they may seem – are the only ones with the money and audiences to reliably create hits and win rights deals. That’s why NBC’s Olympics footage and HBO’s Game of Thrones can be kept off legal online channels by old-school media moguls. And that’s why so many start-ups are looking to find legal and sorta-legal hacks around the limits those moguls have established.

“Consumers expect content in new ways that traditional media companies are either uncomfortable with or reluctant to provide, creating opportunities for others,” says Michael Robertson, who runs a terrestrial radio recording service called DAR.fm (it's like Tivo for your radio) and whose MP3.com battled with old media giants 12 years ago.

In other words, the old media companies are constraining their content so severely that there’s more upside in retransmitting the old stuff in new ways – even boringly obvious new ways – than in creating new stuff. And that's why we have so many re-runs, and why it looks like we're doomed to have so much more in the near future.

In time, new content should eventually mushroom. Netflix and YouTube have begun putting money into some original internet content. And, as Robertson points out, they have years and years of experiments to draw on as they do so.

“There are [already] superstar videos on YouTube not owned by major media companies,” he says. “Even back in MP3.com days, we had some of those – though the internet was a tiny fraction of what it is now.”