• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer, October 16, 2014

Well, that didn’t take long. One day after HBO announced it will launch a stand-alone HBO online service, CBS this morning premiered CBS All Access, an online service that lets viewers in 14 of the nation’s biggest cities watch many past and present CBS series, and other content for $5.99 a month, and stream their local CBS station live. Without subscribing to cable

The current season content includes 15 series, that can be viewed one day after their broadcast. For right now, CBS All Access is available in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Francisco, Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, Miami, Denver, Sacramento, Pittsburgh and Baltimore, all cities where CBS owns a station. It’s talking to affiliates about adding to that.

P.S. Sign up now and you can watch a week for free

The development suggests a very quickly moving avalanche of television networks and studios moving quickly to announce online apps and services. It’s a very real sign that the content business is suddenly racing into the broadband space.

The service will also provide access to 5,000 episodes of other series, not necessarily ones that first aired on CBS.

And though subscribers would end up paying nearly $72 a year for CBS All Access, they’d still get a boatload of commercials.   CBS told The New York Times that live stream shows will still have 12 to 16 minutes of commercials per hour. In the paragraph after that, The Times quotes  Marc DeBevoise, executive vice president of CBS Interactive saying  “It’s going to look a lot like Netflix,” though, of course, Netflix is commercial-free. (Shows from the CBS Classics collection will show without commercials.)

But paying for programming getting commercials is not a trick CBS is inventing. HuluPlus, the pay service owned by every other major broadcast network except CBS, charges its customers and also shows commercials.

Regardless, the CBS announcement is another tipping point that shows large media companies are coming to grips with the fact that online viewing is real, growing, and can be made profitable, and that the years-old contention that cord-cutters were defecting from cable has been supplemented by fears that cord-nevers could be making the cable model more untenable. 

That CBS, with the oldest audience among the Big 4 networks, is gliding into becoming an online service shows how dramatically the content business is changing.

The other obvious trigger is that measuring online viewing is now coming into the Nielsen mainstream.  

Now, an avalanche of business reactions is now much more likely, including a new push for ala carte programming by cable operators, and a new interest in original streaming content, now that, suddenly, more people than ever might be looking in. Sony, Dish and ABC all have developing streaming strategies.

And in the way that chattering about changing technology helps propel that change, the HBO and CBS announcements, separated by one day, creates a new momentum. Things are going to change even faster now.