Net revolution - and rerun

Thirty years ago the launch of CNN was keeping Ted Turner busy. ESPN was on the drawing board at Getty Oil. HBO was helping Time Inc. confirm that consumers would pay for television content. The emergence of cable and pay-TV programming marked an exciting and explosive stage in America's communications history. As we enter a similar period with digital technology, it's worth reviewing what was learned from the video revolution three decades ago. As cable reached critical mass, its situation was strikingly similar to that of the Internet. It was primarily a delivery system, capable of transmitting content to places where it had not been available, and in volume - "shelf space" as cable programmers termed it - that seemed almost limitless. Cable's early entrepreneurs faced the same fundamental challenge that Internet operators are struggling with today: how to get consumers to pay for content that historically had been free. The cable industry solved this problem in two clever ways - by chopping the content into small pieces and then by packaging many of those pieces together.