Unless you count telling my kid the Wii is “broken” so I can play Kid Icarus for the better part of a weekend, I’m not exactly a hardcore gamer.

So I’m not sure what to make of OnLive, a service that charges you $15 a month to access, which doesn’t really seem to include “access,” per se. Plans to launch the service during the E3 2010 show on June 17th were announced today, and for a mere $180, you get the opportunity to stream all kinds of games to your Mac and PC without a fancy hardware investment. With your $15, you also get to demo games, watch people play games, play the games you’ve purchased with other people and store your game related stuff in the cloud.

You’ll be able to “rent” games with your subscription (pricing unavailable) but pricing for game purchase (also unavailable, but called “competitive” by OnLive) is expected to be in line with the going cost of games. OnLive told you what you get for your money in a blog post:

Included in your monthly service fee are OnLive-exclusive features such as instant-play free game demos; multiplayer across PC, Mac and TV platforms; massive spectating; viewing of Brag Clips™ video capture and posting; and cloud-saving of games you’ve purchased—pause, and instantly resume from anywhere, even on a different platform.

Also included in the monthly service fee are features you’d expect from standard online games services such as gamer tags, user profiles, friends, chat, but with a twist: everything is live video. You’ll be friending through multiplay, Spectating, Brag Clips, or by flipping through video profiles of friends of friends of friends. OnLive is delivering the first instant video-based social network. It’s really cool.

If you’re big into games and think the service has promise, the first 25,000 people to sign up get their first three months of OnLive free. The company says that in initial testing, players didn’t realize games were being streamed and that streaming quality is fantastic. But it remains to be seen how the service will work when rolled out to people across the continental US. (Hawaiian and Alaskan players are not eligible to use the service.)

So gamers, is this something you’re into, or does it sound like a big waste of money?

Okay so much to the dismay of freetards around the world questions about the idea of “freenomics” is being called into question. Even the Gray Lady of New York is planning on sending their free model to the bush league and returning to a paywall.

Subscription economy looks to be the new buzzword which probably has Murdoch drooling with visions of vaults of gold coins.

Suddenly the Web just got a whole lot more expensive.

Brian Barrett over at Gizmodo gives an interesting breakdown of how expensive it is for a lot of people already and that isn’t even taking into account what it will be like after the arrival of the subscription economy.

Nick Carr summed it up quite nicely

It’s a strange world we live in. We begrudge the folks who actually create the stuff we enjoy reading, listening to, and watching a few pennies for their labor, and yet at the very same time we casually throw hundreds of hard-earned bucks at the saps who run the stupid networks through which the stuff is delivered. We screw the struggling artist, and pay the suit.

Somebody’s got a good thing going.

So what kind of effect will the subscription economy have?

Well consider all those main sources of news that we all gravitate to right now. The Wall Street Journals, the New York Times, The LA Times, MSNBC, Fox News and probably about a half dozen more spread out through our reading day. Now let’s assume that they fall for this subscription economy and they all want a piece of your wallet each month it won’t be long before all those little digs into your wallet start to add up.

Just as freenomics may not seem a sustainable business model neither is the subscription model. At some point the accumulation of subscriptions will prove to be too costly for the masses (which are precisely the one’s needed to make this model work) to afford. At this point whatever upswing the content producers have seen as far as income will begin to slide back down.

There is a breaking point of the number of subscriptions that we are willing – and able – to support. That number however is nowhere the numbers needed by those dependent on the subscription model to remain viable.

The last really big shake-up that came to television was the advent of cable but since that point it has really subsided back into business as usual. The same crap but on 500 channels that we are forced to buy into as the good is bundled with the bad. There has been a lot of talk about a la carte style programming which is suppose to allow subscribers to pay for only the channels they want but to this point both networks and cable companies have been resistant.

Then along comes broadband speeds and an increasing willingness of people to turn to the Web for their video fix. Even though heavily geotarded sites like Hulu show us that it is possible to find a growing audience for series type television shows. This of course followed on the heels of sites like iTunes where you could download shows for a set price.

Now I might not agree with the idea that Apple is anywhere near knee-capping the cable companies but any discussions that entail consumers being able to have control over their own viewing habits is one we should be having. It is in this environment that we are finding ourselves and the television networks and cable companies may not have the control they think they do over the whole scenario.

Since word broke that Apple is talking to television networks about some sort of subscription service that would see consumers being able to subscribe to individual show series’ the cable companies are making noises that they want the same kind of deal.

“If Disney and CBS believe this is the model to embrace, it’s worth pondering whether they’ll embrace that for all distributors,” said Melinda Witmer, Time Warner Cable’s chief programming officer.

The Time Warner Cable comments underscore how much Apple’s possible subscription service threatens to fray the television ecosystem. TV companies make money by selling bundles of channels to Time Warner Cable, Comcast Corp., DirecTV Group Inc. and other distributors through which roughly nine out of ten American households watch TV.

If TV programmers agree to let distributors select piecemeal channels to sell to consumers, it could threaten smaller cable channels such as News Corp.’s Fuel TV and Lifetime Movie Network, owned by Disney,  Hearst Corp.  and NBC Universal.  It also could push down the overall payments TV-network owners receive from cable-TV, satellite and telecom companies.

Source: Wall Street Journal

This transition to consumer choice in television viewing via Internet isn’t a matter of ‘if’ anymore but rather of ‘when’ and who is going to be the first to cross that line. It will result in the biggest transition in television that we have ever seen and it scares the hell out of the networks because they will not have the same control anymore.

For consumers it will truly be television on demand and only what you want to watch without being burden by a bunch of stuff you will never end up watching. It will also have a profound effect on the very television shows that we watch and this is worrisome to the networks as well because it is no longer a world of national blockbuster shows but rather niche blockbusters.

For advertisers this will only be an extension of the hell that they are already going through with the transition of print to web. The last bastion of their dominance really is the television world as it is now. As television changes, as print has, advertisers are going to find that ad fragmentation and the importance of niche groups will only increase as will the difficulty in finding ways to maximize this new territory.

There is one bottleneck to this transition though that no-body is addressing and that is the cable companies, as well as the telecommunication companies, hold the keys to this new television landscape. It is interesting that at the very time that companies like Netflix are increasing their availability of streaming movies and television companies are looking to do the same thing with their products the broadband providers are increasingly capping consumer accounts.

On one hand the cable companies are wanting to offer up the same kind of subscription deals as well as provide the pipe for other companies providing such a deal but on the other hand they are telling consumers that they are going to need more expensive plans to enjoy these new services. It is one thing to offer up television series’ subscriptions but all those shows will count against any caps you might now have imposed. Caps that once you go over will either have you paying extra for every byte over or you could see your account degraded to dial-up speeds.

As it stands right now both the television industry and the broadband provider business are trying to position themselves where they are still in control and they are making more money than before. In effect it isn’t about giving the consumer real choice but rather about stalling as long as possible until they can be sure that the status quo doesn’t change all that much and they can still screw the consumer.

There might indeed be a shake-up coming but I’d be willing to bet that when all is said and done the consumer will still be getting the short end of the stick.

As more tech oriented blogs look to expand their revenue base in light of weakening advertising dollars some are experimenting with specialized services for a subscription fee. GigaOM was among the first to go this route with their GigaOM Pro service which provided members with specialized market research papers.

Today Ars Technica is following in those footsteps with their just announced Ars Premier subscription service. For the $50.00 per year you will have access to

• subscriber specific content which will include news, analysis, interviews and in-depth technical articles.
• moderated live discussions with Ars editors and industry players
• full access to the Ars Technica PDF library
• membership in the Ars Editorial Roundtable where you will be able to discuss, refine and propose ideas for the editorial and community aspects of the site.
• special forum features including subscriber only titles
• banner free browsing of the Ars Technica site
• subscriber only access to full text RSS feeds
• promos, specials events and discounts.

As with GigaOM it will be interesting to see how this develops and if more tech related blogs will try and follow suit.

I like newspapers, really I do. I like stopping at the newsstand and having a look at the headlines and then carrying on my merry way.

Now if I’m not the type of person who is willing to fork over 2 bucks for a dead tree version of the news what idiot news publisher thinks I, and thousands like me, are going to fork over anything to read the same thing online.

Apparently Lionel Barber, a brain trust editor at the Financial Times, does because he has predicted that within 12 months “almost all news organizations will be charging for online content”. Now whether it will be a per article micropayment or a monthly subscription is still up in the air but be forewarned folks you’re going to have to pay to get your news online.

Barber said last night that the Financial Times had pioneered the concept of a "frequency model", giving access to a limited number of articles on the web before asking users to subscribe.

"We are seeing sustained and growing revenue as a result of our strategy of premium pricing for quality, niche global content – crucial at a time of weakening advertising," he added.

"Many news organisations are following suit in charging, latterly the New York Times which had previously come down in favour of free access to its own content."

Source: Guardian – Financial Times editor says most news websites will charge within a year

Of course he couldn’t let the interview go by without making the obligatory slam against bloggers as being anything remotely similar to real journalists even though he did admit that us lowly bloggers have broken a story or two. In general though Barber says

"do not operate according to the same standards as those who aspire to and practise crafted journalism. They are often happy to report rumour as fact, arguing that readers or fellow networkers can step in to correct those "facts" if they turn out to be wrong. They are rarely engaged in the pursuit of original news: their bread and butter is opinion and comment."

This from an industry that invented tabloid news and semi-naked women on inside pages so they could sell more papers. Sure .. okay …

Newspapers as they move away from the print world and try to embrace the online distribution of news are being faced with how they are going to make money. Advertising might work for blogs and other small news oriented endeavors but when it comes to the size of operations like The New York Times advertising supported distribution isn’t going to cut it.

Even at the peak of advertising on the web some would argue that there wouldn’t be enough income from ads to keep the newspaper running the same way it has been. Now that we are in an advertising slump it is even harder to pay the bills, let alone make a profit. So the folks at NYT has been floating a survey asking if people would be willing to pay $5.00 a month to access the NYT’s website.

As Hamilton Nolan at Gawker pointed out – if all 650,000 print subscribers paid this $5 a month NYT would see an instant influx of $39 million per year. Now as nice as that kind of money would be the chances of even getting close to that is next to nil. The fact is that as iconic as the New York Times might be in this day and age of news coming at us a mile a minute from more places than you can shake a stick at there is nothing special about NYT that would justify paying a per month fee.

The reality is that very few news organizations will ever be able to get away with charging any kind of subscription fee. Where the news in the past was made available by those with the money to invest in things like printing presses and vast distribution chains that is no longer the case. Today news distribution is a zero sum game where anyone can distribute both broad ranging news and niche news.

Does this mean that organizations like the New York Times can’t survive in a zero cost distribution world? Definitely not. The problem is that they are still trying to mold old world practices into a new world of news instead of using their brand and immense database of news to create a new organization that can live – and profit in the new world of news.