mac [dot] honan [dot] net

My editor and bearded buddy Jim Dalrymple has a great piece up on Macworld today looking at what the Multi-pass will mean for the future. It's a big step. (And you read about it here first! Or, well, maybe you didn't. But I wrote about it first, jerky. At least as far as I know. Oh, shame and embarrassment.) It's going to be a much better model for downloading regularly-updated content than buying on a per-episode basis, and it's going to fundamentally change video delivery, at least according to one of the analysts Jim spoke with:

“What we are beginning to see here is an indication of an important future trend,” Phil Leigh, president of Inside Digital Media, told Macworld. “This [The Daily Show] is one of the most significant developments on the Internet.”

Jim also points out that, contrary to what the crap you read on the electroweb might say, it's not a subscription service. I have to agree with Apple's take on that. "Subscription service" is a term of art and people mean something very specific by it.

But here's what I would like to see: I'd love it if Apple adopted an eMusic-type model, where I could pay a monthly fee to download a set number of music and/or video files. I was talking to Eric Garland of BigChampagne about this recently, and it just makes sense. The all-you-can eat model turned ISPs from mom-and-pop shops into telebehemothseths. Once cell-phone providers left a pay-per-minute model and offered pricing tiers, everyone in America got a mobile. eMusic, from what I'm told, makes good money. (What's more they do it without DRM). And then there's NetFlix. The Multi-pass is sort of a step in that direction. I'd like to see it advance even more.