• by January 10, 2005

America Online today said it's renaming its cable music video channel "AOL Music On Demand," representing the latest in a series of moves designed to direct a wider Web audience to AOL content. AOL's cable music video channel was formerly dubbed "My Music Channel."

AOL's sister company Time Warner Cable has been promoting music content, including popular videos and original programming, in recent months. With the name change and other promotional strategies, AOL hopes to lure millions of non-subscribers - plain old music fans - to AOLMusic.com and to their other channels. Time Warner Cable customers can order music videos and AOL programming for free via their remote controls. This service was previously only offered to subscribers of Time Warner Cable's high-speed Internet service.

In promoting a free, on-demand music service, AOL hopes to lure millions of eyeballs as it continues to suffer subscriber losses. AOL hopes that making its content widely available will attract millions of people and, of course, millions of dollars in advertising. It's a strategy that runs counter to something that the New York Times Co. is pondering - charging readers for its content which has been free.

Gasp! Yes, the venerable Times Co. has been chafing over this issue for many months. But how it plans to convert an online readership accustomed to getting everything it wants for free -- a virtual all you can eat feast -- to a paying audience, is beyond me. And that's not to mention the complications for the advertiser base. The Minute got wind of the Times Co.'s internal debates and divisions on the subject last summer. When queried, Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of the Times' digital unit, New York Times Digital, told us nothing was "imminent" in the way of an announcement about transitioning to a for-pay subscriber strategy. That was August. Clearly, with the debate in the public domain now via a cover story in BusinessWeek, the company is beginning to seed the concept. The Minute thinks it is a foregone conclusion that we readers will be paying something soon for the content we have been enjoying gratis.

We are interested to see what the plan is and how it will be executed without alienating readers and advertisers.