In a previous life I worked for Chello Broadband. In the late nineties Chello was incubated to add services to cable broadband. One of the things we did was ’steel a portal design’ and fill it with content from content providers. We even had a special person for this: VP Licensing. Naturally this model of content distribution is all but extinct (in the mobile industry you keep seeing operators with ambitions to own the user through a portal.) Users don’t pay for television content on the web. But the web is not going away. ESPN still needs to make some money for what they do. So they devised a new ’scheme’, and their freshly recruited VP of Licensing is visiting ISP’s with an offer they can’t refuse: pay or we deny access to your users. Perhaps a little bit new wine into old wineskins. But definitely a delicious interpretation of Net Neutrality. Do you think ESPN has discovered the new business model for content?