There's been some discussion in the comments to this post about media disintermediation - I think the best one pointed out that the deadline based, pull from the wire service, support via ads model is dying. I think the only thing that's going to work is special interest (tech gadgets, specific sports, etc), and hyper-local. If all you report is wire stories, why should I bother? As to the op/ed pages - blogs are killing that.

That whole thing brought to mind the problems that TV providers are starting to have. I don't mean the content providers, or the broadcast networks; I mean the cable/phone companies. Those outfits are involved in two businesses that are in the process of colliding: broadcast TV through the wire, and ISP service. Back when bandwidth was limited, there really wasn't a conflict. Now? There are plenty of good reasons to scale back the (expensive) cable service and watch shows directly off sites like hulu. I can jack the content straight to my TV pretty easily, either by using cables, or by recording the streaming content and tossing the bits at iTunes.

That's a problem for the cable services. Their video on demand service, and the marked up plans they offer are where the money is. IP service is a flat rate, so having people bail over to it is a potentially big hole. I think that's why we're starting to see bandwidth caps introduced. I seriously doubt that most people are going to cause grief grabbing 100 gb a month - except insofar as that interferes with the cost added cable services.

I'm expecting the same kind of pitched battle over this that we saw with DRM and music, and that we're still seeing with DRM and movies.

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