Walled gardens come, walled gardens go

AOL announces (PaidContent) that it is bringing down its walled garden - as Om points out, thus consigning dial-up to the dustbin of history - just as ESPN is reportedly (SeekingAlpha) looking for new walled-garden exclusivity deals for its TV content with ISPs.

Carl Howe points out that "(w)hile this may sound innocuous at first glance, if it became widespread, it would lead to a balkanization of Internet content" - which is possibly true, in terms of availability of legitimate content, but therefore practically irrelevant in terms of the strategy ESPN needs to find right now.

Distributors who are losing the benefits of their gateway / scarcity models don't need to contrive a new gateway - they need to find a consumer model so simple and universal that many people use it instead of just stealing the content over BitTorrent. They need to learn the lessons that Napster so painfully taught the music industry and work towards an iTunes for video content, whether that be iTunes iself, YouTube, Google, a legitimised P2P network or something else we've not seen yet.  Trying to reinvent the broadcast model online when they need to be microchunking their content and forming a distributed strategy for its dissemination is just ostriching. SeekingAlpha again: "(s)uddenly, it might be necessary to have a Verizon Internet connection to watch ESPN, but a Comcast...one to watch HBO". Not quite - it might be necessary to have a Verizon connection to buy ESPN. If the speculation is true, ESPN hasn't thought this one through at all.