I’ve been keeping this post in draft form for the past couple of weeks, awaiting the final episode of HBO’s series, The Wire. I had thought about a tribute to Jimmy McNulty or Omar Little, but those characters live on. And then there’s Charm City, probably the biggest character of the entire series.

But I’m not writing today to share my memories of Baltimore. I left there at a time when the O’s still played at Memorial Stadium and Eddie Murray was doing commercials for the Diplomat Shop. And I frequented the Sip-and-Bite before the warehouses on Boston Street had been torn down to make room for condos.

Suffice it to say that I procured a six of Natty Boh, threw some Old Bay onto the popcorn and enjoyed the final episode of what may be the best television series ever.

And while I’m thankful that HBO brought The Wire to us, I have to ask about the future of this type of programming. In Season 5, the story of the newsroom makes no mention of internet competition. This may have been an editorial decision, but like many things in The Wire, it stands for something larger. I like to interpret it as HBO’s apparent ignorance of the medium.

Because The Wire inspires a fanatical, loyal audience. And HBO has done little to capitalize on the online presence of this audience. It’s a digital media blunder of massive proportions. Like most companies in the media industry, HBO still relies on static, one-way content and communications. Cable television. Video on Demand. DVDs.

And absolutely no internet distribution.

So here we are at the peak of a television show, and all HBO can do to monetize the audience is to charge subscription fees and to give viewers a woefully unsatisfying website replete with Flash animation, a couple of minor videos and….drumroll please…message boards.

Where’s the social network?

Well, it’s actually at Google Earth where there are dozens of location posts on the different seasons.

And it’s over at Wikipedia and IMDb . And the Baltimore City Paper did an interesting piece touring some of the locations for the series.

The point being that digital media is as much about creating audience as it is leveraging existing ones. The Wire audience was HBO’s to lose. And lose they did.

Let me tell you my story

For those of you who don’t know The Wire, it’s the kind of show that you have to watch from start to finish. At least season by season. But don’t expect to miss a few episodes and understand what’s going on.

Back in November, we knew that Season 5 would be the last one for The Wire. And HBO put Seasons 3 and 4 onto VoD. Actually, HBO put season 3 on until December 12. Then they went to season 4.

And — in typical form — I started watching season 3 and got to episode 11. Then HBO went to season 4. So I missed the climactic last two episodes.

Undaunted, I soldiered on into season 4, dragging my girlfriend into the fray. Two episodes in, and she was interested. By the mid-point of season 4, she was hooked. So she bought us seasons 1-3 on DVD so that we could be completely up to speed for the final season. The first 30 episodes took us a month to watch, and by the middle of season 3, we hit a pretty major snag: the DVD was unreadable. At that point, we couldn’t return the DVD and were out of luck.

So we did the next logical thing. We went online. After all, according to Yankee Group Anywhere Consumer research, 72% of people in the US who watch television episodes online do so because they missed the episode on the linear schedule. And we were no different.

First stop, the HBO site. We can find a plot summary. But no video. No links to places where we can download the episode (iTunes anyone?). Second stop, iTunes. No luck there. Third stop. Amazon. $40 plus shipping for another copy of season 3.

By this time, I was cursing HBO for obvious reasons. It’s one thing to force our viewing into windows. That’s OK. And it’s another thing to constrain us to crappy Video on Demand interfaces when we have web browsers and powerful computers. I’d rather download over the internet, but that’s not an option. Instead, we have DVDs. And I have a useless chunk of plastic in a nice cardboard box. Wonder what I can do with that.

Think of the irony. A brilliant show called “The Wire” that focuses on the use of telecommunications and wiretaps to track criminal conspiracies. And I can’t use the wire that comes into my house to get the episode that I want.