Comcast sees the approaching problem:

“An entire generation is growing up, if we don’t figure out how to change that behavior so it respects copyright and subscription revenue on the part of distributors, we’re going to wake up and see cord cutting.”

While most people are taking this as a pirates vs media or Hulu vs cable story, the story they’re missing is in the reference to subscription revenue.

The problem is, what consumers want is a la carte programming, but the content providers won’t let Comcast or the other cable companies even sell individual channels.

Steve Burke of Comcast knows that Hulu is the wrong model, and not because it’s free. Even if Hulu introduced a paywall, it would end up being another big bundle of channels, and nobody wants to pay subscription prices for all the channels they don’t want.

Cord-cutting is already happening. I ditched cable and satellite TV in favor of AppleTV and PS3. Trying to charge subscriptions for Hulu is just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.