We all knew the expansion couldn’t go on forever. Demand is up, money is flowing – it’s been a heady cycle. Now, they tell us, activity will fall by as much as 20 percent in the next year or so.

The housing market? No – well, not quite yet, anyway.

The “Golden Age” of television production is, by some accounts, heading into its golden years. After one more year of feeding the content beast, the domestic market will be saturated, the finite pool of ad dollars will be spread as thin as possible, and viewers will have become completely siloed into small pools of superfans of shows no one else watches.

The result will be plummeting domestic production. That, at least, is the prediction of FX Network President John Landgraf.

Now, it’s not all bad news. There are plenty of markets overseas clamoring for American programming, many of them not named China. So the big producers – the studios, their competitors in the streaming realm, and cable channels – will likely turn their attention to those markets to feed their bottom lines.

That’s OK for HQ, but not that great for the regional production industry. Tax incentives may play a part in luring production back from North Carolina, but when the wheels fall off the American bus and programming is being made in France for French audiences, all the tax breaks in the world won’t bring production back.

Which is not to say the future is entirely bleak. That looming long tail of TV viewers – the narrow, deep core of committed viewers shows on AMC or Netflix are able to attract – offers a great opportunity. Regardless of how the programming is delivered, its creators know ever more about viewers.

Whether your production slate is supported by subscription fees or ad dollars, being able to make the case that you are putting it in front of quality eyeballs is a luxury the old broadcast networks never had when the Nielsen box was the sole source of viewer data. And that’s an elevator pitch that leads to the bank.