Pay TV providers have long complained that TV networks force them to carry channels they don’t want. But in recent weeks, those complaints have turned into action, with Cablevision suing Viacom to break up the network’s bundle, and Verizon starting to talk about paying programmers based on their performance, as opposed to a flat fee for a bundle of channels.

So who is trying to break up the bundle, and how? Check out our list:

Verizon: Putting its money where your eyes are

Verizon execs have been talking for some time about changing things up, to the point where director of consumer video services Maitreyi Krishnaswamy, who is responsible for the company’s FIOS TV service, said last year that cord cutting wasn’t growing fast enough for the company. The logic behind those remarks? If consumers cut the cord, then programmers are going to be more willing to rethink the deals they’re having with Verizon.

Verizon sells bundles – but it would like to change them.

Looks like this is now beginning to happen, at least on a smaller scale. The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that Verizon is pressing smaller channels to pay them based on their actual performance, as opposed to a flat fee per subscriber. The result wouldn’t actually be a pick-and-choose TV lineup. Instead, Verizon would potentially distribute even more channels — but only pay the ones that are actually attracting eyeballs.

Making this model work won’t be easy for Verizon, especially when it comes to the biggest cost drivers, which are sports channels like ESPN. But some smaller channels might be eager to sign on. This could potentially lead to some cheaper bundles that offer actually more content, save for some of the most expensive fare.

Cablevision: Suing to get rid of the duds

Cablevision has chosen to take its attack on the big bundles to the courts: The company sued Viacom last month to get out of a contract it struck just two months earlier, arguing that Viacom is forcing the company to carry a number of channels its customers don’t want. The lawsuit is about a total of 12 channels like MTV Hits and VH1 Classic, but it could ultimately threaten the whole concept of a bundle — which is why it will likely get settled out of court.

Aereo: A new kind of bundle

Aereo is circumventing the cable bundle altogether with an offer that’s squarely aimed at cord cutters: The company offers streaming of broadcast networks like ABC, CBS and NBC for as little as $8 a month.

Aereo’s tiny antennas could have a big impact on bundles.

It’s undercutting the cable companies through the use of a legal loophole, which involves an elaborate setup of miniature antenna farms, and resulted in a lawsuit brought against the company by those very broadcasters. However, the company won a first round last year, and is now looking to expand to close to two dozen cities this spring.

To learn more about Aereo and the company’s take on the future of television, check out our upcoming paidContent Live conference, where I’m going to chat with the company’s CEO Chet Kanojia about these very issues.

Boxee: Unbundling the DVR

Boxee’s new Boxee TV device comes with a promising proposition: The device won’t just let you watch major broadcast networks without paying for cable, it will also upload any show airing on those networks to a cloud DVR with unlimited storage and streams them not only to your TV, but also to your iPad or computer. Boxee’s cloud DVR is currently only available in limited markets, and the device itself has been met with mixed reviews – but the idea behind it is definitely disruptive, because it’s essentially TV Everywhere without the expensive cable price tag.

Netflix: Showing that you can succeed without a bundle

Netflix has long shied away from discussions around cord cutting and cable bundles, with execs insisting that that wants to be complementary to cable, and that it will eventually just be another channel that consumers subscribe to, just like HBO.

Netflix’s House of Cards is like a cable show, but without a cable bundle.

However, the big difference is that you can only get HBO as part of a premium cable bundle. Netflix, on the other hand, is available to anyone, no matter whether they pay $50, $120 or nothing at all for cable.

That strategy has been working well for the company: Not only does Netflix now have 33 million subscribers, investors have also given the company a thumbs-up on its original content strategy, with stock roughly doubling since the beginning of the year.  And with new, original shows about to debut on Netflix every month this spring, the company seems to demonstrate HBO that you can, in fact, succeed without being part of a bundle.

Image courtesy of Flickr user HarshPatel;Photographer.

The operator now wants to invalidate a deal the two parties struck just two months ago, and instead just get the good stuff. You know, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and maybe a little bit of MTV proper.

Cablevision sent out the following statement about the lawsuit:

“The manner in which Viacom sells its programming is illegal, anti-consumer, and wrong. Viacom effectively forces Cablevision’s customers to pay for and receive little-watched channels in order to get the channels they actually want. Viacom’s abuse of its market power is not only illegal, but also prevents Cablevision from delivering the programming that its customers want and that competes with Viacom’s less popular channels.”

A Viacom spokesperson sent us the following statement in response:

“At the request of distributors, Viacom and other programmers have long offered discounts to those who agree to provide additional network distribution. Many distributors take advantage of these win-win and pro-consumer arrangements. Reflecting the highly competitive cable programming business, these arrangements have been upheld by a number of federal courts and on appeal. Viacom will vigorously defend this transparent attempt by Cablevision to use the courts to renegotiate our existing two month old agreement.”

The lawsuit also alleges that Viacom threatened “massive financial penalties” if Cablevision refused to carry the 14 lesser-watched channels in question. The operator is asking for a permanent injunction that would bar Viacom from bundling its lesser-watched channels with its more popular core offerings.

On paper, this lawsuit is an interesting challenge to the cable bundle, which has been largely dictated by the broadcasters. Operators have long said that they would like to sell their customers smaller and more flexible bundles. Broadcasters have made this impossible by either directly bundling all their channels into one big package, or by other conditions that make sure operators can’t sell bundles without certain channels.

However, it’s unlikely that this lawsuit will be fought out until the bitter end. Because at the core, this is about something else: Broadcasters have in recent years significantly increased the carriage fees for their fares, leading to a number of nasty fights that left consumers without their favorite channels for weeks. In the end, content owners always won, and carriers caved in, agreeing to pay more before their customers have yet another reason to cut the cord.

Cablevision and Viacom negotiated a last-minute carriage agreement in late December. Details of that deal were not made public, but it’s obvious that Cablevision wasn’t happy with the outcome. Now it wants to get a better deal, and threatening the bundle is the biggest asset it has in this fight.

Image courtesy of Flickr user  nyghtowl.

On Tuesday, for example, Cablevision announced that its Optimum app will now be available for Kindle Fire users, further proliferating the technology that lets the cable company’s users stream live TV programming from their receivers to notebooks, tablets and smart phones anywhere within their home.

Also read: Few cable users aware of TV Everywhere

Cablevision says that 1 million of its 3.2 million video subscribers are using Optimum.

TV Everywhere, of course, was the broad pay TV initiative introduced by Time Warner Inc. and Comcast back in 2009, intended to let cable and satellite subscribers watch programming on next-generation devices.

TV Everywhere player apps provided by content providers are still profoundly limited based on what deals have been cut with the myriad pay TV operators and device makers.

For example, I can download the Watch ESPN app for my iPad 2, but I can’t use its core functions because Disney hasn’t yet made a TV Everywhere deal with my multichannel company, DirecTV, for ESPN.

Also read: One TV Everywhere deal down (Many more to go!)

At least in my home, however, I can watch a live stream of ESPN — or any channel I subscribe to — on my tablet or iPhone via the DirecTV Everywhere app, provided my DirecTV digital video recorder is connected to my home network.

Currently, the box is not connected. But I called the satellite carrier’s tech support center Tuesday, and a friendly rep agreed to next-day me free of charge the company’s “Cinema Connection Kit,” which he said will connect the receiver to my home network with minimal setup.

A Cablevision rep I spoke to right after said his company offers a similar gear free of charge. However, since Cablevision is also the internet service provider for most of the customers it delivers video too, most of its boxes are already connected to users’ home networks.

For its part, Cablevision also announced its second-quarter earnings Tuesday, reporting a 0.5 percent increase in revenue to $1.7 billion and a 16.7 percent profit decline to $26.3 million. Video subscribers stayed flat at 3.2 million.

“We believe that Cablevision is looking to launch a service similar to Comcast’s Streampix  later this year,” Greenfield blogged Thursday, shortly after Cablevision reported the addition of 7,000 multichannel subscribers during its first-quarter earnings call.

Now, Dolan (pictured) didn’t say anything during Thursday morning’s call about this — in fact, in his blog, Greenfield griped that Dolan didn’t respond to any of his questions or concerns.

But as supporting evidence for the assertion that an SVOD platform is on the way, Greenfield noted that Cablevision referenced “unspecified software investments” during the call.

“While timing is uncertain, we believe Cablevision is concerned about the coming Verizon/Redbox joint-venture that is expected to launch (in beta) this summer,” he added. “We want to understand how much capital Cablevision is planning on spending on the project and how it will be marketed to consumers.”

As for that earnings report, fortunes seem to be picking up for Cablevision on the multichannel side, with the company adding more video subscriptions in the New York metropolitan area than in any quarter since the early recessionary period of Q2 2008.

And as it is for most cable companies these days, broadband services are growing, too, with the company adding 41,800 high-speed data subscriptions in the second quarter.

As of Wednesday, when Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) made the service available to its nearly 3.2 million subscribers, HBO Go is finally, well, almost everywhere, available to 98 percent of houses that subscribe to pay television. Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) Inc. is aggressively pushing the industry-wide TV Everywhere initiative, which calls for TV programming to be opened up to a wide range of digital devices, accessible to anyone on their computer, tablet or smart phone provided they can “authenticate” that they have a paid cable, satellite or telco TV subscription. And the HBO Go service is the leading edge of that push — no other TV programming supplier has made more deals and infiltrated its TV Everywhere service further than HBO.

But it’s not really everywhere just yet.

In addition to mobile devices, Time Warner Inc. CEO Jeff Bewkes has strongly urged pay TV providers to also allow authentication of TV Everywhere services in the living room. And since the end of October, HBO Go has been available on the set-top boxes of Roku, one of the so-called over-the-top services.

But even though all of the big cable and satellite companies have agreements in place to authenticate HBO, as first reported by GigaOM in November, three of the top four service providers — Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) and Time Warner Cable, which collectively control over half of U.S. pay TV homes — still won’t allow their subscribers to watch it via Roku.

Meanwhile, last month, HBO Go finally rolled out on Samsung smart TVs, but Comcast, the No. 1 cable company in America with over 22 million subscribers, won’t authenticate it on those sets. Neither will No. 3 provider Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC).

Now, with HBO Go set to roll out on Xbox Live — perhaps the biggest over-the-top service of them all, with 40 million subscribers worldwide — media technology analysts including BTIG Research’s Richard Greenfield are curiously waiting to see who allows their subscribers in. As Greenfield noted Thursday, Comcast has a deal in place to make its on-demand programming, including HBO Go, available on Xbox Live through its Xfinity app.

However, while broadly criticizing the set-top programming interfaces and remote controls the cable industry leases to its customers, Greenfield called upon Comcast to allow its subscribers to directly access the HBO Go app on Xbox Live for what he calls a “simpler, cleaner user experience.”

In fact, in an earlier but related blog post, Greenfield urged companies including Comcast to stop clinging to a model under which they lose money by leasing set-top boxes to their customers.

His central thesis: the faster cable companies like Comcast enable their customers to access their programming bundles through broadband-enabled services like Xbox Live and Roku, the quicker profits will ramp up for these cable companies’ higher-margin internet service provider operations.

On the same day that HBO announced the surprise cancellation of its high-profile original series Luck due to a series of on-set horse-related tragedies, its Go service rolled out on Cablevision (NYSE: CVC). With HBO Go — and sibling Cinemax platform Max Go — rolling out on the nation’s ninth-biggest cable system, the platforms are now distributed to 98 percent of pay TV subscribers in the U.S.

HBO Go and Max Go allow those who subscribe to HBO and Cinemax, as well as participating cable, satellite and telco TV systems, to access HBO and Cinemax content through personal computers and iOS mobile devices. And the Cablevision launch is the last major cog in the rollout of the platform.

HBO has been among the more aggressive content companies when it comes to TV Everywhere initiatives, which involve striking a series of fairly complex deals. Each and every content conglomerate has to sign authentication deals with each and every major cable operator, and almost no one has cleared its authentication deals across as many cable operators as HBO. Among pay cable competition, Showtime is just getting ramped up with its “Anytime” authentication service. Starz, meanwhile, is still in the development stage for its multi-device platform. As of January, HBO had 29 million subscribers; it has yet to say how many of those subs also get Go.

For its part, Cablevision is including HBO Go in a newly created online destination that will house all of its other initiatives related to TV Everywhere, the cable-industry-wide effort to expand its model to internet and mobile distribution. Subscribers to Cablevision services can visit http://www.optimum.net/TVtoGo and download TV Everywhere apps for 12 different channels, including Turner Networks properties CNN, TBS, TNT, trueTV, Adult Swim and Cartoon Network.

Canoe’s New York office space will be shuttered within the next several months, and 120 employees will be let go, including Kathy Timko, who had served as CEO since last summer. A significantly slimmed-down operation that includes about 30 engineering-focused employees based in Denver will continue on and will be headed by Joel Hassell, who previously served as Canoe’s chief technology officer.

Canoe was formed in 2008 by six cable service providers — Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), Cox Communications, Charter Communications (NSDQ: CHTR), Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) Systems and Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) — with the intention of using advanced cable set-top boxes to revolutionize TV advertising. The goal was to create technological standards for targeted ads that could be sold across cable systems so that, as one Canoe official said early on, “dog food commercials would only be seen by dog owners.” The standards would include interactive features, so that targeted cable subscribers could, say, ask for more information about a new car they just saw advertised with a click of their remote.

But three years into the project, Canoe could only render a scaled-down version of its plan involving only around 25 million homes — well shy of the 100 million-plus that it was targeting at the outset. And while the initial concept had called for Canoe to sell across different cable operators, Canoe’s competing cable owners, including Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) and Cablevision, wound up grabbing whatever interactive TV opportunities came their way and doing the selling themselves.

Meanwhile, tepid demand among advertisers and the programming partners of the major MSOs for interactive TV products also played a role in the decision to shift Canoe’s focus. A report issued by Deloitte Touche earlier this week put the current market for interactive TV ads in the U.S. at under $200 million — out of a TV ad market that’s collectively sized at around $60 billion. “This is very much in response to what the marketplace wants,” a Canoe spokesperson told us Wednesday.

The Deloitte report, which polled 50 senior media executives, summed it up this way: “The existing system is not broken.”

According to the Canoe spokesperson, the decision to give up on interactive ads was the result of meetings over the last several weeks that included Canoe management and executives from the MSO overlords that founded it four years ago.

“Today, Canoe Ventures is evolving to focus its business on providing a platform for MSOs and national programmers to monetize on-demand content across multiple platforms — both video-on-demand inside the home, and TV Everywhere outside the home,” Hassell said in a statement. “This is in line with Canoe’s founders’ original vision, which is to make cable television households the most attractive platform for advanced advertising. It also aligns with the priorities of Canoe’s direct clients – national programmers.”

While Canoe wasn’t able to get all its constituents on the same page, it did in some ways show proof of concept. Just last week, it released the results of a study it jointly conducted with the American Association of Advertisers, in which a panel of 4,200 cable subscribers revealed increased product acceptance when shown interactive ads from brands like Honda, Fidelity, GlaxoSmithKline and State Farm. According to the year-long study, 19 percent of adults 18-49 said “yes” to interactive offers, while 36 percent expressed a likelihood to purchase.

New York-based Aereo, which has received the bulk of its $25 million in funding from Barry Diller’s IAC (NSDQ: IACI), believes it has found a legal way to channel broadcast-network signals to its users without having to pay the same costly re-transmission fees cable, satellite and telco TV service providers do.

Since each subscriber will use his or her own dedicated dime-sized antenna, located at Aereo’s Brooklyn, N.Y., head end, to receive their signal, the company says it is not subject to the same retransmission responsibilities as say, Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) or DirecTV (NYSE: DTV).

Officials for representative body the National Association of Broadcasters have yet to issue a statement about Aereo. But speaking to reporters at a Manhattan press conference Tuesday, Aereo founder and CEO Chet Kanojia said, “We understand there will be challenges.”

Just within the last few years, broadcast networks including ABC (NYSE: DIS), CBS (NYSE: CBS), Fox (NSDQ: NWS) and NBC have begun demanding fees from cable, satellite and telco service providers to re-transmit their signals. With cable networks commanding millions of dollars to have their feeds carried, broadcasters successfully argued that it’s only fair that the networks running TV’s most popular content should be compensated for carriage, too.

These retransmission fees have quickly become vital pieces of the networks’ bottom line, with CBS expected to take in more than $250 million in retrans compensation this year. According to SNL Kagan, so-called retransmission consent fees are expected to total around $3.6 billion by 2017. That’s not quite the $9.3 billion in advertising revenue that broadcasters secured at last spring’s record upfront market, but it’s an increasing portion of the total revenue pie nonetheless.

Even with retransmission fees at that level, CBS Corp. president and CEO Les Moonves told investors last year that his company is “vastly underpaid,” given the huge audiences and big programming events found on CBS relative to even the biggest cable networks.

What’s more, broadcasters have a history of fighting disruptive technologies like Aereo. Just last year, for example, they won a U.S. District Court injunction against Ivi TV, which was also streaming the signals of broadcast stations without gaining consent or paying re-transmission fees.

The legality of Aereo, which provides its subscribers with the ability to record local broadcast signals on a virtual dual-tuner DVR for $12 a month, is unclear. (Aereo was formerly named Bamboom.) For example, last year the studios were able to stop Zediva from operating a streaming service that let subscribers access their own virtual DVD player. But on the other hand, Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) was able to defend its remote-storage DVR when it was challenged in court by a host of cable networks.

In fact, that appeals-court ruling – which said it doesn’t matter where a DVR is located, as long as its for personal subscriber use — could have special relevance for Aereo’s claims to legitimacy.

“Each RS-DVR playback transmission is made to a single subscriber using a single unique copy produced by that subscriber,” read a federal appeals court ruling. “We conclude that such transmissions are not performances ‘to the public,’ and therefore do not infringe any exclusive right of public performance.”

Speaking at an investor event conducted by parent company Liberty Media (NSDQ: LINTA) in November — just after Starz announced that its agreement with Netflix would end in February — Chris Albrecht, the pay network’s CEO, said an “authentication app” similar to HBO Go would be announced sometime in 2012.

A Starz representative would not comment regarding a timeline for the release of such a product, which would allow Starz subscribers to view the network’s shows on any device by logging in with a username and password registered with the video provider.

With its Netflix deal to stream archival Starz original series episodes and licensed movies due to end next month, Starz — the third biggest pay-cable provider — now finds itself playing catch-up in the technological race it began.

While many expected Starz to make an announcement at CES this week, it was Showtime that stepped up and answered HBO’s volley, touting a new iPad application that allows its subscribers at participating distributors to watch more than 400 hours of the network’s programming on their tablets.

Showtime officials said the app will be in the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iTunes store sometime in early 2012, with access for subscribers of AT&T’s U-Verse and Verizon’s FiOS carrier services. Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) subscribers, meanwhile, will get Showtime Anytime through the carrier’s Xfinity TV service. The network says more distribution deals are in the pipeline.

Meanwhile, HBO Go — and its Cinemax-based Max Go sibling — are rolling out now on Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) system. And with that, Go is now available to 98 percent of the pay network’s subscribers. Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) will be the last MSO to launch the Go service, and that should happen sometime in the first quarter, an HBO rep told paidContent Wednesday.

That leaves Starz, traditionally one of the more innovative networks in regard to on-demand technologies.

Predating its arrangement with Netflix, Starz had established Vongo, a movie-rental download service that at one point offered more than 1,500 titles for an additional subscription fee. Although Vongo no longer exists, Starz still supports online downloads of its content through carriers including Verizon FiOS, *AT&T* U-Verse and Comcast Xfinity.

Starz was also the first premium cable provider to participate in Comcast’s on-demand trials in 2009, making more than 300 movies and a number of original series available to the 5,000 subscribers in the trial.

Not too long ago, TV Everywhere was a bold concept being evangelized by Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes: subscribers would pay once for programming on cable or satellite, then have access to that content across platforms and devices. It provided a potential solution for multichannel operators frustrated by programmers sharing their content for free digitally with consumers directly and for programmers looking for leverage with digital rights and access, and could be a valuable anti-cord cutting tool.

Bewkes offered Time Warner’s own premium HBO, available only as pay TV through cable, satellite or telecom, as an example of how it would work. Subscribers who paid for HBO on, say, Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), would have access to HBO Go via authentication. It worked beautifully, offering instant online subscription video on demand (SVOD) of current shows, The Sopranos, The Wire and more while expanding the potential value for subscribers by untethering it from the TV. The catch?

Subscribers have no control over access. It only worked as long as Time Warner and Comcast or other pay TV distributors could agree on terms. It took two years for HBO to be available to the bulk of its pay TV subs via authentication on computer or portable devices; major holdouts Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) and Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) only signed on as 2011 came to a close. That came after TWC and Cablevision added a twist — asserting that the channels they traditionally provided through TV could be available on any screen through an in-house network.

Pay TV isn’t alone. On the video side, Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Hulu, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iTunes and others expanded from computer access to over-the-top boxes, gaming consoles like Xbox, tablets and smartphones — and through some of those or connected TVs, to TV sets. At Conde Nast, Time Inc. and some other magazine publishers, print and digital only-only subs get full access for one subscription. The New York Times offers options at different costs for different kinds of digital access but home delivery customers get it all included; other newspapers have their own variations.

It’s not exactly the content nirvana offered up by Qwest in its prescient ads about being able to offer every movie, book or musical performance ever produced to a customer at an off-the-beaten-path cafe or a middle-of-nowhere motel (as long as the business had an efficient broadband provider). But it is the beginning of a new age of ubiquity for people willing to pay for content — and scarcity for people who don’t pay directly.

Yes, it sounds a little off base to describe anything digital in terms of scarcity. The usual argument against charging for access is the consumer can get news, info and entertainment from a lot of sources and will turn to those rather than pay a fee. It’s a fair argument and one that rings true in a lot of cases, enabled for years by a traditional media strategy that untethered the print-video dual revenue stream of subscription/licensing and advertising for online distribution and by new digital-only ad-supported outlets. The expectation created was this kind of content would or should be free online. Most of today’s pay efforts are based on balancing that consumer expectation with the reality that online advertising alone can’t replace the disappearing dollars on the traditional side.

We are looking at a different kind of ubiquity and scarcity in digital content today, one that operates almost like pay TV and broadcast. Pay and you get access. Want it for free? Access may be delayed and some content won’t be available at all. Through last season, if you wanted to watch Glee after it aired on Fox (NSDQ: NWS) — a broadcast network — the new episode was online in 24 hours at Hulu or Fox and usually the five most recently aired episodes were available. Starting with the 2011-12 season, unless you subscribe to Hulu Plus or a multichannel provider that has a deal with Fox, you have to wait 8 days. By the way, the only way to get Hulu anywhere but a computer is to subscribe to Hulu Plus for $7.99 a month; basic Hulu is online only.

It also creates some of the same barriers as premium and pay TV. Some were in on Sex and the City or The Sopranos from the beginning; others didn’t meet Carrie or Tony til syndication. For the past few years, some of those barriers have been lowered as networks experimented with digital access. Now they’re going back up. Expect more networks to follow the Fox approach.

The app explosion opened new options. Papers like The Guardian that espoused free online access were willing to charge for app downloads and now, for app subscriptions. Apps became a new revenue stream — potential for some, very real for others — and added a new quandary. Should subscribers have access across every new platform and device for one fee or pay separately?

That’s particularly important when you consider that the cost of developing and deploying new apps can run into serious money for some publishers. Distribution has costs, too. Publishers who want to take advantage of the built-in sales base for iTunes and others have to pay for it with a share of the fee, usually 30 percent. They also give up some or all control over the customer relationship unless the subscription comes through the publisher outside of the app.

News Corp.’s tablet tabloid The Daily went for browser scarcity, charging for full access via iPad app. The same company’s New York Post blocks browser access on the iPad, requiring a paid app, but is open online for now. The Post is trying to keep apps as a separate pay space; its 52-week $273 “digital bundle” includes only the print subscription and the replica e-edition. (App subs get the first 30 days for $1.99, then it’s $9.99 a month or $99 a year.) The New York Times now includes full online access with subscriptions to its Kindle and Nook editions but its digital subscription access doesn’t include the Kindle newsstand, which is operated by Amazon. Freemium Spotify is only free online; the premium part covers mobile access.

The Boston Globe solved a lot of this in one fell swoop by designing its new subscription-only bostonglobe.com with HTML5, rendering it easy to read in any browser on any device. Boston.com is still free but gaining access to the full print and online content from the Globe takes a subscription to the new site.

There’s not an easy answer, especially when “everything everywhere” is a mantra.

As a subscription addict, I’m all for ubiquitous access. More than that, I expect it — and as a traveler who uses a mix of ways to read and watch, I need it. I’ve been separated from my home video subscriptions for 10 weeks now (broken Slingbox connection doesn’t help) and paying for a lot that I literally can’t see is frustrating. I know I’m an extreme case, though, both in my willingness to pay for multiple subscriptions and in my access requirements. I look to family and friends who are far less extreme though and I see a growing expectation that access to content, especially the kind you pay for, will be ubiquitous.

That doesn’t discount new platforms and devices as revenue streams. Each opens new opportunities for subscribtions or for one-off sales/rentals.streams/downloads. That does’t make it cost effective for every publisher to develop something new and device-centric, which either means doing without or accepting that some access will come at the expense of creativity. In the old days we called that shovelware; today’s more sophisticated development environment offers some better options.

In an iPad tablet world, it was easier to put off some of these decisions. But despite iPad’s continued dominance, choice is increasing as is Android’s market share. Millions of Kindle Fires are in use now plus Nook tablets, Samsung Galaxy, and more. Each OS has its issues but content publishers and creators have one that overrides them all: the need not to be left behind when a consumer switches devices.

That’s where “pay once, get it anywhere” should pay off.

Read the rest of the posts in our Coming in 2012 archives.