>>The recent claim that the TV series may be dead soon because people don't want to watch ads, so if people would please watch them so we can keep them alive - is anywhere between ridiculous, false, moronic and outright rude, IMO. When was the last time they tried without ads? When was it they last tried to make money by collecting subscription only? I don't count HBO, because 1) they self-advertise a lot, 2) you can't take one channel, you always must buy the bundle.
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>>Why bundle, afraid of the market?
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>The subscriber model is alive and well. The higher cable channels that are commercial are just like regular broadcast ( there used to be a UHF spectrum that was much the same ) but you pay for the cable distribution. Yhere is also a market for reaching audiences through advertising. The problem isn't all that, it's the distribution model - i.e. cable or satellite. The advertising model is getting weaker since people TIVO or record and skip commercials ( I almost never watch anything in real time )
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>I think the future of television will be very much what you describe - subscription over broadband as either pay per view or subscription to a particular series/show including the whole back catalog. All digital, same broadband as internet. The days of network television are coming to an end.

Good, and bad. Back in the seventies we were cursing our state TV, just like pretty much everyone does, but nowadays I'd make it out of mud if I could - it was sooooooooo goooooood compared to this {expletive left to reader's imagination}. I've seen EVERYTHING on it - ordinary people, the best performances of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chehov, Sartre, Ionesco, all the classical movies you can imagine (including most of John Ford, Orson Welles, Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, and almost all of the great movies of 70s except Easy Rider), we were watching R'n'R concerts live, even a live premiere of Jesus Christ Superstar featuring the 1st league of Yu rock n pop of the time. And the news were news - 30 minutes of nothing but. And the ads were limited to 5 minutes once an hour, or less (enough to learn to hate them).

Well, I can only wish and remember. It was all the stuff that works so good when you don't have to cater to most of the ratings and lowest common. As one song said, "stvari bolje hodaju kad ne misliš na prodaju" (things walk better when you don't think of sales).