"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."