I was watching C-Span today and caught a portion of a speech by Josh Sapan, CEO of Rainbow Media Holdings. He was talking to the Washington Metropolitan Cable Club about video on demand systems and touting Rainbow's new system: MagRack.
Sapan basically argued that a new cable service needs to have a context that make consumers want to buy a service. MagRack is basically a video magazine rack. You can choose to receive video on demand from about two dozen channels on topics like vegetarian cooking, cars, and science. I was impressed with Sapan because most of what he said was reasonable and free of the recent cant that cable television representatives and others have spouted. He talked about personal video recoreders without falling into the silliness of claiming that the technology makes consumers into thieves and he acknowledged that the advertising market model might not work in the future. If cable television fragmented the audience technologies like MagRack may fragment things even further.
I browsed the web site for a little while this evening and then hopped over to Time Warner Minnesota to see if they are offering the service. They are not. Cablevision, Rainbow's parent company, is only available on the east coast. So where is the competition in the cable industry that justifies the recent actions by the FCC declaring cable modems to be an unregulated data system.
Rainbow is also the owners of Bravo, American Movie Classics, Independent Film Channel, and numerous sports channels.
11:50:17 PM 
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