Looking for the Proceeds in TV-on-Demand

[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Richard Siklos]
For five decades or so, the television industry's main mission has been to come up with hit programs, get them on screens, and hope people will stop and watch. Now, that is just the starting point. As an era of ordering TV shows at the push of a button gets underway, new challenges are clouding the landscape in the year ahead: What business models are going to work and who is going to get paid what? Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, a technology and market research company based in Cambridge, Mass., predicts TV shows available by video-on-demand will eventually be free, and that new interactive business models for advertising on demand will help pay the freight. For instance, he believes broadcasters will adopt "click though" pricing models similar to the fast-growing Internet advertising on portals like Google and Yahoo. Under that scenario, the network would be paid each time a viewer clicked on an ad or perhaps an icon super-imposed on the screen that paused the show they were watching and took them to a longer commercial. Cable operators including Comcast, Cox Communications and Charter Communications have already made long-form advertising such as sponsored musical performances and infomercials part of what they offer on free video-on-demand. TiVo - a service for which subscribers pay a monthly fee to access - offers so-called showcases to advertisers. These showcases encourage customers to check out long-form advertisements and special promotions when they are browsing through a cable company's listing of TV shows, for example.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/business/media/05media.html
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