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Comment by mason55 | Hacker News Reader

> I agree that it seems strange to have both pay + ads

> I would not be a fan if this pay and pay model became the norm.

Maybe you've heard of cable television for which you both pay and see ads? I think it might catch on at some point...

Snarkiness aside, think about what the "value" is/was that cable brought to the transaction. The value of cable was that you could get channels (and thus content) that you could not get from 'over the air' stations. Early cable adopters people with poor or non-existent over the air reception. Then cable added the equivalent of UHF channels (sorry if that is a US centric thing but all of the channels on that band in the US were a bit 'off'). Then came the 'movie' channels which you could only get on cable and the reason people paid for cable was that other content which they had no other way to get.

Internet service was never a threat until bandwidth got to the point where you could watch video on it with the same fidelity as bad TV, then suddenly other ways to get alternate content were available. Netflix dropped into that change just as affordable 1 - 3 mbit bandwidth was hitting (the whole ADSL revolution in the 90's) and since the bandwidth race that has just gotten worse.

So cable, which you paid for, was the only way to get this "other" content, which carried free over-the-air content with its concommitant advertising as a 'favor' to its subscribers so they didn't need an antenna (and they did get better reception, but not HD, but that is a different thread). Now folks are dumping cable for things like Netflix and Hulu because they can get content "ala carte" and Netfix on demand is better than all of the 'budget' movie channels on cable (think Encore, Starz, or Cinemax) and now they go back to over the air reception (now digital) of the free content. Comcast is disintermediated because they don't bring anything to the party (except, to their pain, fast internet access).

That is the sea change that is going on here. Fat pipe providers as a commodity, and a bunch of different services being content providers on demand.

Having lived through the transition from broadcast-only tv to widespread cable tv, that's not at all how it was sold. Cable was sold on the merits of primarily: better reception (no more antenna!) and many more available channels. The dollars that you spent on "cable" were for those features, primarily. The channels themselves were "free" and carried the advertising they always had. It was kind of like buying internet access, in that most people don't expect that all content accessed via the internet will be ad-free.

The unbundled CBS isn't really akin to paying for cable. You're already paying for your internet access yourself. If anything, CBS online will be like a "premium channel" in cable tv terms. Which, historically, have been generally ad-free. I assume the reason for that is the market figured out that people don't like to both pay for some particular channel and see ads.

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