Slashdot is running An Essay On Subscription Television. Consider the question:
Who would pay $1.99 to download a television episode that only costs about $0.0014 to see on cable?
Just for the sake of answering it, here is my list:
- Somebody, who is outside of reach of cable (international customers)
- Somebody, who doesn’t want to see any commercials (not all cable is ad-free)
- Somebody, who needs to test credit card operations, or network configuration
- Somebody, who would want to watch the episode over and over again. On his mobile phone.
- Somebody, who blogged about the episode, linked to it, and wants to see if the link is fully functional.
Oh, well…