Those three words broadly sum up the attitude of the broadcast TV network chiefs regarding the encroachment on their turf by digital media companies, as they conducted their traditional springtime dog and pony shows for advertisers in New York this week.

Two weeks earlier, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and other big digital media companies closed out their “Newfront” presentations to the same constituency, appealing for a portion of traditional TV’s annual $70 billion market share.

But as this week’s upfront presentations revealed, the linear video guys still have lots of swagger.

“Not Google, Netflix, Yahoo or, YouTube can compete with our scale,” Fox Broadcasting entertainment chairman Peter Rice told advertisers and their agencies Tuesday. “They’re now buying shows — good for them. In reality they’re going to find they’re in the NFL. It takes a lot to make a show that people want to watch across all media.”

“Everyone is still talking about the first screen, the TV screen,” CBS Corp. chief Les Moonves told the Carnegie Hall audience Wednesday. “The first screen must come first, and there’s no second screen without it.”

For now, the money seems to backing up these claims.

With the CW delivering the last of the big broadcaster presentations of fall schedules on Thursday, network ad sales executives and media agency TV buyers will commence their annual negotiation dance.

During these transactions, large automakers, drug companies, packaged-goods makers and other big brands will buy the bulk of their commercial time for the coming TV season.

Last week, Morgan Stanley media analyst Benjamin Swinburne predicted that broadcasters would see about a 1 percent increase over last year’s upfront market haul, estimating their take this year to be around $9.16 billion.

Swinburne projected that cable networks — whose collective market share is being specifically targeted by companies including Google, Yahoo and AOL — will see their upfront revenue increase around 4.3 percent to $9.69 billion.

“We think it is still too early for online video to be meaningfully disruptive to TV,” Barclays Equity Research analyst Anthony DiClemente reported Wednesday.

The average U.S. person, DiClemente noted, still watched 153.19 hours a month of TV in the fourth quarter, compared to 4:34 hours of online video and 4:20 of video on phones.

Digital as we wanna be

When they weren’t belittling the premium video efforts of the digital stalwarts, network entertainment chiefs were touting their own digital prowess.

Rice told advertisers that on Fox, their brands “can live across platforms, with digital and social we can engage with your customers like never before … We’re delivering both impressions and expressions that makes Fox the number one network on TV and social.”

Meanwhile, on Thursday, CW detailed plans for a new digital studio called CWD, which will produce online programming including game shows, comedies and animation.

One of CWD’s first projects will be Gallery Girl, a series of animated comedy shorts featuring a sarcastic SoHo art gallery owner who plies her acerbic wit to her celebrity patrons.

On the other side, digital companies weren’t really expecting to peel away too much in the way of digital market share this year. Their objective is a longer-term play.

“We’re gearing up for 2013,” Yahoo’s head of video and original programming, Erin McPherson, told paidContent in March.

But the latter seems to be happening this television season. On Wednesday night, new ABC comedy Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23 became the latest new show to seemingly benefit from an emerging strategy in which shows debut online before their network premiere. Wednesday’s 9:30 p.m. performance of the new James Van Der Beek comedy–which was posted on Hulu nine days earlier–was more workmanlike than spectacular, with the show holding nearly 70 percent of the audience of the hit sitcom that preceded it, Modern Family.

How much of Don’t Trust the B‘s ratings performance came from online buzz-building is nearly impossible to say. But it looks like the strategy of establishing word-of-mouth for a show via online sampling could become standard practice for the broadcast networks going forward.

The strategy has been popular on cable for several years, starting around 2008 when ABC Family made the season-three premiere of youth drama Lincoln Heights available on one-time Comcast video site Fancast.com.

But it’s just been this year that the Big Four broadcast networks have embraced the concept. And by and large, it’s hard to say it’s taken viewership away from traditional television, starting last fall when Fox let viewers sample its new Zooey Deschanel comedy, The New Girl  on platforms including the actress’ very own HelloGiggles.com site weeks before its Sept. 20 premiere.

Perennially the No. 1 network in broadcast TV’s most sought-after demographic–adults 18-49–Fox’s major flaw had been that it had long struggled to launch new sitcoms. But New Girl got out of the gate strong, averaging more than 10 million viewers, and it never looked back.

New Girl‘s success seems to have spurred a trend.

NBC preceded the Feb. 6 debut of its highly anticipated Broadway-themed drama Smash by making the show available starting Jan. 16 on iTunes, Amazon, Xbox Live, PlayStation, Samsung MediaHub and Vudu. The show has struggled to live up to expectations, but it’s premiere was quite strong, with 11.5 million viewers tuning in.

Meanwhile, among pay cable networks like Showtime, such pre-sampling is already standard practice. For example, prior to their season premieres Sunday, Showtime made “dramedies” The Big C and Nurse Jackie, as well as period drama The Borgias, available for free streaming on platforms including YouTube and  iTunes. Season premiere ratings results  were mixed, with Eddie Falco series Nurse Jackie up 7 percent over its last season premiere with 653,000 viewers upon its initial run, but Big C and Borgias both down season-over-season.

Earlier in the season, however, Showtime garnered its best drama premiere ratings in eight years when it let viewers sample in advance the Claire Danes series Homeland. More than a million viewers tuned in, which is big in Showtime’s subscriber-supported universe.

Not only is such sampling intended to build buzz for the show, but it can also entice non-subscribers — a fact that hasn’t escaped pay-cable rival HBO.

On Thursday, the network announced that its newest series, the Sex and the City-esque Girls and Julia Louis-Dreyfus dramedy Veep, will also get the treatment. However, free access on platforms including YouTube will not be made available until after these shows’ respective April 15 and April 22 premieres.