Cable as a dumb pipe

Image by Getty Images via Daylife Comcast and NBCU chiefs want to team up, but that doesn't mean it's the right or only move in the playbook.

I’m at the paidContent 2010 conference today, and roughly halfway through, everything I’m hearing from the panelists is reinforcing an idea I’m still trying to give some shape and form to in my mind: the idea that primary revenues for media needs to come from somewhere other than subscription and even advertising models. I’m not saying those models don’t work or aren’t important, components. But neither one replaces the simple newsstand or corner box as a low-barrier, no-thinking-required flagpole for newspapers to get penetration and ultimately revenues from the casual reading public.

The conversation as of late has shifted away from friction–the idea that websites that charge have to offer a quick, easy way to pay in order to convert readers. Part of that is because the friction has indeed been reduced somewhat as of late, but mainly because worrying about friction is a like worrying about a problem that does not yet exist. If the only reason people weren’t paying for news online were friction, the thinking goes, well, we could fix that.

Well I would maybe argue that all friction is there until there is no friction at all. Why aren’t cable companies, in other words, paying websites for the content they deliver to homes, they same way they pay carriage fees to the cable channels they deliver to homes? What if the money pipe were reversed?

To be clear, the technical challenge of the meter here would not be much of a challenge at all. The real challenge is the business model for this, and the massive psychological shift it would take for content providers, users and the cable companies. But I think it’d be brilliant if I got my cable bill every month and had a couple nickels charged to me for access to the Times, CNN, PBS, whatever. Net neutrality is obviously a big concern in this model. But good legislation (ha!) could help level the playing field between sites that remain free and sites that ring the meter on a user’s Internet account. I wonder if Google as high-speed ISP might not attempt something like this.

As far fetched as this already is, I’m certain it will never happen. Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal clearly shows where the cable cos minds are. They have no interest in being dumb pipes, and plowing profits back into better speeds and technical features. They all want to be content companies now, too, controlling every link in the supply chain from shooting the pilot to streaming the video to your iPhone. That’s why no matter how dumb some of the things Google has done as of late have been (Buzz) I agree with Farhad Manjoo that Google’s ISP plan is brilliant. It’s putting pressure on cable and phone ISPs in a way that hasn’t existed for years and years. Here’s hoping it’s not one of the 60-80% of products they launch that eventually fail.