Lost Remote makes a bold claim and is nearly right (TheKnot and Comcast's marriage):

Your life changed last week. If you work in TV or on the web, your work life changed immeasurably. If you're a TV or web user, it changed nearly as much. Why? TV stations are now unneccessary.

Comcast and wedding website TheKnot.com have announced a new V.O.D.-only channel that will feature programming from The Knot on Comcast's digital cable.

So what?

So with one move, a website becomes a TV channel - without the messy (and expensive) need for a television station or churning out 24 hours-a-day of fresh programming. No more "feeding the beast" of all-day, all-night cable. They can put up what they have, and swap out the shows people aren't watching. [emphasis in original]

Absolutely, and there is much more insightful analysis, but the problem I see with this is that it still leaves the cable company as a gatekeeper. True broadcatching bypasses such gatekeepers. I also don't really see cable companies opening up their services to all comers, as it would likely undermine their existing subscription models and relationships with major content producers. See, also, 500 Channels with Nothing On? Nah - No Channels At All.

Still, this is an important article to read and an important experiment to keep an eye on. Check out the comments too.

Read on for many other links and etc...

An interview with Rupert Murdoch on STUFF shows that he has a clue what some of the possibilities for the future of television are (Murdoch's media vision)

"I think they [PVRs] will become ubiquitous. People won't have loyalty to a particular channel. They'll hear about programes on some unheard-of channel and watch that."

Read the whole thing for some other interesting comments from the media mogul. via Darknet

The other big story concerning broadcatching today is Akimbo the Internet-to-TV service, as related in this AP wirestory (On TV -- from the Internet). Interesting, but their business model (yet another set top box, subscription, and pay per download) doesn't excite me too much and I doubt many early adaptors will be excited either. Still, worth keeping an eye on.

Techdirt has the right response to a new television/P2P startup called Atzio (Professional BitTorrent?)

A startup, Atzio, is now claiming that they have the first peer-to-peer internet platform for television, apparently ignoring something like BitTorrent. Of course, the technology can basically be described as... BitTorrent with copy protection (how innovative). Plus, they only allow a select group of clients to seed material on the network, making it less likely that people will bother to download the software to make it possible for all this P2P television distribution. The company's own website, amusingly, claims it's having trouble handling all the traffic from the news of their launch -- which might raise some concerns from a company telling the entertainment industry they can handle the distribution of large files in great demand.

TV Week (reg. req.) has an interesting article on the extra content that is being produced by existing broadcasters that might be used as additional broadband content ... perhaps for broadcatching? (Recasting Content to Meet Demand). via Technology360

MIT's Henry Jenkins has some interesting thoughts about broadcatching on his blog (Downloading Television, Legal or Otherwise).

C|Net News reports something I mentioned over a month ago (AOL gives exclusive sneak peek for fall TV)

America Online said Tuesday that it will stream the pilot episode of the WB Network's new show "Jack and Bobby." AOL will allow subscribers to watch the entire program for a week in hopes of generating hype before the show premieres this fall. The company also will stream clips from other new shows such as NBC's "Joey," CBS' "CSI: New York," and ABC's "Desperate Housewives." AOL and the WB Network are both divisions of Time Warner.

As I mentioned before, "This promotion is taking place in partnership with AOL, but I don't see why other television series don't give this sort of promotion a try via broadcatching" (Broadcatching Roundup - 28 July 2004).

What does broadcatching mean for advertising? Some speculation, and not many answers, on ClickZ (The Consumer Is Taking Control of Advertising). via PaidContent.org

Marc Canter praises Strangeberry (possibly TiVo's broadcatching service) in a Business2.0 article (Saving TiVo). Unfortunately, the full article isn't online.

I don't own an iPod and haven't really considered buying one, but Andrew Grumet makes a persuasive point (Adam Curry reviews iPodder for Windows in this audio blog post, and does some visioning on where the...):

I don't have much interest in buying only-runs-on-Apple-products music files from the iTunes store. Tapping into the growing blog audio network? Now that's a selling point.

Teleread points to AudioBooksForFree.com, which would make some excellent content for iPodder (Teleread AudioBooksForFree.com).