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Scott Kirsner’s written a new book on indy distribution and promotion, and recently commented on the Disney announcement that they’re joining the Hulu consortia. There’s been a lot of hand-wringing on what this means to paid downloads in general, and to iTunes specifically.

Scott points out that with Hulu, people are tethered to the web. Agreed, however let the conversation begin on watching movies with or without commercial interruptions every eight minutes. For TV shows like Deal or No Deal most people have no problem. But are we ready to surrender our film experience to words from our sponsor? Premium viewing started with HBO, solidified with video and DVD, then VOD, and now is offered by iTunes and others.

Will free + ads be the victor? Likely there’s room for both (for our part, New Video Digital has ramped up delivery to Hulu and other free platforms– for their promotional heft). Take a look at the metrics for a TV show like Homicide. On TV tens of millions watched it; the DVD sold hundreds of thousands. By the numbers the DVD got creamed, but those DVDs brought in significant dollars from fans wanting to own their show without interruption.

The takeaway: the battle is not Hulu versus iTunes, but Hulu versus cable providers. And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Time Warner says, no free lunch

The New York Times had a story yesterday about Time Warner Cable’s failure to jump start an “a la carte” rate card. The COO attempted the analogy of two friends at lunch- one eats a salad, the other a steak. Should the friends split the bill down the middle? How unfair is that to the light eater? Interestingly, the plan was to increase the rates (substantially!) for the big eaters.

Like a “no star” restaurant review the paper destroys the metaphor, and hints that the motivation for the rate hike is actually their eroding monopoly on entertainment coming into the home through that coaxial cable. The article states:

Cable systems in the United States use the same technology and have roughly the same costs. Comcast told investors that the hardware to provide 50-megabits-per-second service costs less than it had been paying for the equipment for 6 megabits per second.

With Netflix, iTunes, Hulu and others at play, it seems that cable behemoths just might be relegated to their business roots of being utility companies.

You can’t blame them for trying to price all streaming and downloading companies out of the game. You just can’t let them get away with it.

The article is worthy of a read (registration required)– NYT: As Costs Fall, Companies Push to Raise Internet Price