The end of the world of the fixed schedule and the monopoly of geography gets closer every day. Comcast CEO will announce today Comcasts plans to deal a blow not only to local TV stations but also to the cable approach of restricting choice. (NYT) Maybe Mr Roberts may talk today at CES about “Project Infinity”? which they plan to offer more than 1,000 titles.

In an interview last week at Comcast’s Philadelphia headquarters, Mr. Roberts said his goal was “to give consumers the ability to watch any movie, television show, user-generated content or other video that a producer wants to make available on demand.”

The plan, which Brian L. Roberts, the chairman and chief executive of the Comcast Corporation, will describe in a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is aimed at making a nearly limitless supply of movies and television shows available on television, where Comcast subscribers could view them on demand, and through the Internet, where anyone with Web access could watch them.

Although the television component is still at a nascent stage — Comcast’s existing video-on-demand service has about 300 titles, compared with the 6,000 it eventually hopes to offer — the Web portion is further along.

Comcast has set up a site called Fancast.com where viewers can watch more than 3,000 hours of television shows from NBC, Fox, CBS and MTV and where they will soon be able to remotely program the digital video recorders in their homes. The shows on Fancast are available free. Comcast has yet to say how it will price the rest of the content as its plan moves forward.

My prediction is that in 2008 we will see a Tipping Point. Mainstream viewers will be offered ways of having TV on demand. Currently Innovators and some Early Adopters already have this - they use Torrents and YouTube.  It helps to recall what happened to Music. For a long time the Innovators and Early Adopters also had to work to get their music. But then the iPod and iTunes made the process easy.

The mainstream are prepared to pay for convenience.

They will pay to have a convenient way of accessing high quality TV on demand. Not a lot but in aggregate the dollars will be a lot. For instance a copy of a Nature film on PBS is $19.99 plus shipping plus all the time it takes to get to me by mail. Few are going to make this transaction. The PBS Nature page already allows me to get a preview streamed online - why would anyone wait for a DVD?

What are some of the emerging business models?

On iTunes there is a small charge per transaction. In Canada I can get an episode of South Park for $1.99. I would pay more for an hour of say Nature or Nova. How much more? Maybe $5.0. If it was easy to find and easy to get.

On XBox with 10 million members there are 2 levels of membership - one is free and one is pay. We are all very used to this idea by now. The Free Flickr service gets you a taste, the Pro gets you the goods. I can see this working too.

At the moment most of the new suppliers of content on demand are still in the transaction world. At5 the moment, the traditional suppliers of content - our local TV stations both private and public are in deep shit. For On Demand Content for the mainstream is just around the corner.

What can be the best possible approach for a TV station and why might there be a business model that can put them and us the consumer back into a valuable relationship with each other?

More later