If you've been watching the trends, you'd know that organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have been trying for years to gain more control over the content the sell to consumers. Everybody knows about the scary "FBI Warning" that appears at the beginning of all VHS tapes - an attempt at control using Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD). Next there was the copy controls on DVD's - which were very quickly and effectively reverse-engineered and eventually center-stage during the MPAA vs Realnetworks lawsuit about DVD copying software. Not long ago, Blu-ray encryption suffered the same decrypted fate. DVD Region codes have been put in place to make sure that profits throughout the world are maximized.
More recently, the MPAA has successfully lobbied the FCC (after two years) to allow a form of control called "Selectable Output Control" (SOC) to decide whether the signal coming through to your TV can be recorded by an external device or not (see: FCC Gives Hollywood the Right to Break your TV/DVR). Didn't hear about that one? It's because it's being kept on the down-low. A quick Google search for Selectable Output Control garners results for 2 public awareness sites (publicknowledge.org and eff.org), 2 wikipedia articles, 14 tech blogs, one YouTube video and only 1 major media story (kudos, Washington Post) on the first 2 pages of search results. 
Why now, after so much fighting for control, does it seem like the floodgates of on-demand TV are finally opening up? For one, a fantastic and affordable service called Netflix has shown that there is a growing and inescapable demand from consumers who want to pick and choose specific shows instead of paying for an entire cable/satellite package of channels and programs, most of which are of little interest. Secondly, and probably most importantly, the media conglomerates are starting to realize that streamed content is housed in a centralized location - and centralized locations are easier to control than millions of distributed endpoints! The AppleTV product has recently undergone a massive re-design to move away from the download-and-play content distribution model to a streaming content model. This means no longer is the content ever stored on the AppleTV device itself - the device is merely a receiver, much like antenna TVs in the olden days. Content owners love this, because they don't have to worry about lost revenue via copying, sharing or used markets. Each copy of that content will be paid for, and probably multiple times by the same consumer. How do I figure that? I'm paying $8.99 per month for a Netflix subscription. It's pretty reasonable. However, this month I watch "The Bourne Ultimatum" at some point. Next month, I decide to watch it again, but I've also paid another $8.99 for the right to be able to do so. I've just been charged twice for the same content.So now, not only are content owners looking at stopping their lost revenue opportunities, they're starting to see how they can actually make more off of each individual consumer. I will no longer pay a one-time $15 for a DVD copy of "The Bourne Ultimatum" that I will watch 20 times over the life of the DVD. Somewhere, an economics professor is preaching to a group of students about how a subscription (recurring cost) is always more expensive in the long run than a one-time cost (for an example of this, check out how much money we spend on subsidized smart phones with a 2 year carrier contract....congratulations, you just bought a $500 phone for $2000!).
What does it all mean? Well, it's good for the content owners, since, in conjunction with SOC they'll have the control they've always fought for. It's somewhat good for consumers, too, if it breaks us out of the old cable "package deals" and moves us more towards an ala-carte model of content consumption. But, I'm still a bit nervous as a consumer about relinquishing that much control. An example of how the consumer could get burned: I never watched the TV show "Lost" when it was on the air, but did find on-demand Netflix viewing an ideal way to enjoy that type of show. About 4 episodes shy of finishing the 2nd season, the "on-demand" option disappeared from Netflix. Some content owner somewhere decided that Netfix' license to stream that content had expired. If that content existed on a DVD, Blu-ray or hard drive somewhere in my house, that never would have happened. I am now, more than ever, at the mercy of that mega-media conglomerate.
