"The war is over. The subscription model has won," writes Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC analyst Craig Moffett.
"Free video site Joost is already gone and forgotten... Even before Comcast began its dalliance with NBC Universal, there were reports that Hulu [which NBCU co-owns] was preparing to move to a subscription model... Newspapers are scrambling to put their content behind pay walls...
"The triumph of the pay model isn't just on the Internet. The 'free' model for broadcast TV is also dying" as the old mass market audience breaks up in a hundred or ten thousand little specialized markets.
"The broadcast networks are on their way to becoming cable networks... There is talk of Fox asking for $1 per subscriber per month." Meanwhile cable companies are readying their usual annual increases in many markets, while Verizon "recently raised its FiOS price by 21%" to $58/month for "Premier" service.
"But there's a problem. Where exactly is all this subscription revenue going to come from?" Since consumers are broke, more or less. Maybe media companies "haven't gotten the Recession memo."
if you drive up the cost of cable to where people cannot afford it, when they find other ways to occupy their time, they may not resubscribe when they have the money again. tammy2
Going to a pay model means accepting an audience size several orders of magnitude smaller than you had as free media. If you can live with 1/1,000th as many hits, go for it. But accept that means no more buzz, no viral marketing, no instant celebrity around the water cooler, etc. Might be a tough swallow for your typical egomaniacal press-lord wannabe... andyc
Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC ? Weren't these the same guys that predicted Dow 20,000 by 2012? Just saying..........predictions are like ....... everyone got one and what comes out often don't smell so good. euell
Naw, they weren't Dow 20,000. You're thinking of those perfessers. distefj
This was tried already. It was called 1999. Remember Times Select? Epic FAIL. Rest assured, if there is a void in the "free" space, something will fill it. ambiguator
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