Television is last medium to hit the Net, but it may be first to get it right: Magazines and newspapers were the first on the Web in the mid-1990s and adopted the then-reigning ethos: everything for free. We can always start charging later, went one theory. [...]
Next up was the music industry. Early on there were smart people in the recording industry who saw the potential of legal downloading: What business wouldn?t like to sell direct to the consumer with no physical distribution costs?
But the industry was both complacent and overly concerned about upsetting the existing CD distribution chain. [...]
Now that video-capable broadband reaches more than half of American homes, it?s television?s turn to leap. And they?re doing something that?s collectively very smart.
