The end of Free

You ever discover a new, fast route to get where you are going? a path that was completed and was never open before and you seemed to be the only one that knew it? Then, like an imperceptible rotting, the route gets slower and slower, and finally, everybody knows it and it no longer qualifies for the special term "shortcut".  This can take a year, but  typically happens in a six months or so.

So it has been with the internet as everybody preaching ad-based revenue models, and over the past few years, here they've come and now you are routinely forced to view an ad to get the "free" content.  Well, if you're like me (you workout for at least an hour every day and do ironman triathlons;) you have a couple of HD TiVo's - and rant about the poor service your get from your cable company on on-line forums, but you would perservere.  As it turns out AT&T U-Verse cannot handle Tivo either or I'd have switched already.

After the New Year's day "Murdoch vs. TWC" bowl game, which is now in overtime, it seems that we all will be paying more - somewhere between $0.50 and $1.00 per "free" channel over the air that is received and sent along with the cable channels.  Probably not that much certainly as that would add like $5 to the average bill depending on the leverage of the broadcaster, but will be paying nonetheless.

I don't think this is bad.

AT&T, who sees so much of this, understands that those 5% of users that use 90% of the data need to pay their fare share.  No more free lunch, but people will be paying for what they are using, and some prices may actually decline.