Media Industries Project - Carsey Wolf Center

According to the LA Times, the number of DVD and video stores in Spain has dropped 25% since 2003 -- contributing to the 30% freefall in home entertainment revenue.

For the better part of 50 years, advertisers have used live-only as their currency. In the last few years, Nielsen has added new streams of program data to account for time-shifting. But few, if any, advertisers made deals on these other metrics.

From a TV station's perspective, Thomas says, live-plus-same-day viewing "is more reflective of the way people are consuming TV these days." About 60% of time-shifted viewing occurred during the same day, usually within a few minutes of the live airing.

Warners has even gone further, saying it would impose the same restrictions on Netflix and other DVD by-mail subscription providers unless they agreed to a "day-and-date revenue sharing option."

here's no way of getting around the fact that the studios who are trying to put the muscle on Redbox are making the same mistakes the music business made nearly a decade ago when it attempted -- and failed, quite spectacularly -- to squash unauthorized downloading of music by destroying the dreaded Napster Web file-sharing service.

At some point we'll have a longer, perhaps more intriguing discussion about why so many people have gone from buyers to renters.

When Hulu launched, it was set up as the perfect online distributor for network TV, which was completely ad-supported. But since then, broadcast networks have fought for and won retransmission fees from cable operators, making their model a lot more like cable. The TV business is only 50% ad supported, with $68 billion coming from advertising. When you tally up TV subscriber fees collected by cable, satellite and telcos, it comes to, well, about $68 billion. And the reality is, between cable, satellite and telecom TV offerings, 90% of Americans pay for their TV.

Affordability is the hard part — because there is no competition pushing down prices. The plan acknowledges that only 15 percent of homes will have a choice in providers, and then only between Verizon’s FiOS fiber-optic network and the local cable company. (AT&T’s “fiber” offering is merely souped-up DSL transmitted partly over its old copper wires, which can’t compete at these higher speeds.) The remaining 85 percent will have no choice at all.

significant reason that other countries had managed to both expand access and lower rates over the last decade was a commitment to open-access policies, requiring companies that build networks to sell access to rivals that then invest in, and compete on, the network.

These countries realize that innovation happens in electronics and services — not in laying cable.