Makes me think of the value of media brands and not the value of the print medium they are delivered on. In the consumer goods arena, companies can license a name with almost no knowledge of the fact to an end consumer. Can publishers begin the process of licensing brands to lend credibility to new arenas? The NY Times front page, available in your home town? Probably a better produced front page than what is made today. Not possible? With digital editing and delivery, it sure is. In fact, news sources could aggregate and charge for the brands and content additions that you want, like cable. My Netvibes feed does this to a degree, but the delivery is still Yahoo homepage 2004.

Why pay, when it is all free? Because no industry survives on free and most stubbornly find a way to get back to normal profits over time. If the telecom industry can do it, anyone can.

Beyond Scarcity Marketing with events such as Hannah Montana, Disney is showing that it can also step up to the freshness and frequency needed to stave off the problems of Tivo and its time shifting short attention spans. High School Musical may well run into a 4th, 5th and 6th edition and the expansion of other creative properties on its network are creating many more reasons to watch early and regularly to keep up with the story lines.

Who else is figuring this model out? Trent Reznor of NIN. Didn’t think I could fit together Disney and NIN in one post, eh? Well, Trent has pushed no less than three albums in this year with free content, some pay for content and tons of interactivity with his audience.

Creative frequency is the new grand slam pop chart topper, and interactive is the new means to monetize by leveraging scarcity from a limited venue of both time and place.

At a time when some shows are tempted to lower costs by doing less weeks per year and less minutes per show, the new successful model in media is likely to be more content, more frequently and more interactive. As Umair would say, it is either in the networks’ DNA or it isn’t. I’m long on Revision3 for just that reason.