The Walt Disney Co. said Monday its TV group plans to offer four ABC prime-time shows including "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" online for free beginning in May.
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The TV group also said it will launch a broadband channel for soap opera viewers on April 17, available to Verizon Communications Inc. consumer broadband customers, called Soapnetic.

So it begins. What begins? First, it is formal offering of free shows from a major network. Ad supported, and likely to be better supported when they realize they can do better targetted advertising (the listing is all the Major Brands, like P&G and Unilever) online. I expect these shows will become more scarce on the P2P nets if it is faster and as cheap to download it with the ads.

But more significantly, this is a formal offering of a free TV network over the Internet, for a single high-speed provider. The broadband commodity game is changing...