And before I go all squishy and start talking about multi-platfrom fusion and fragmentation of channels, let me get the news out:

MSN will stream this Sunday's premiere episode of the new Showtime series Barbershop simultaneously with the show's debut on the cable network. It will be streamed on MSN's video page at 10 p.m. on Sunday, and available on demand for the next eight days. In addition to the full episode, MSN will also offer extras such as behind-the-scenes footage.

This is great news for internet geeks like me. Although I don't watch the show, I watch this trend with trepidation. I'd much rather have a choice over what I watch, how I watch it and on what 'medium'. So that's the good news.

The other side of the story is that only the first episode will be streamed and some additional content related to the future episodes will be hosted online, but not the shows themselves. And even those streams although for free will be with ads.

It has been difficult to find 'quality' content free online. By quality I mean not just good value information/analysis/entertainment - there are thousands of blogs, providing all of that - but the kind of content that not everyone can produce from their home computer. Simply put, the production costs are still too high for all good stuff produced to be sloshing around the net. But there is demand (as BitTorrent clearly demonstrates). Podcasting and video-blogging are starting to make a difference but to make content that's been professionally produced available for free is not viable for everyone.

There is an argument that it is precisely because the 'professional' content is declining in quality and availability relative to the explosion of technology and channels, that the 'consumer-generated-content', as it is affectionately known among the marcom types, has taken off.

Nevertheless, I believe Blowing Smoke combines both quality and availability but the challenge of how you make this model work still applies. There are few choices to make online pay for content - you can find a sponsor, you can stick ads to pay for it (provided you have enough 'eyeballs' to impress the admen) or you can charge for it.

With Blowing Smoke the aim is to share with as wide an audience as possible and to recoup the money and effort that has been invested into producing it. If successful, there'll be more to follow and with an alternative distribution possible (fingers crossed), there is a path for other independent film-makers.

Yes, yes, the damn download is coming soon. The bad thing about new technology is that it takes forever to actually make it work, the good thing is that once you get it right, it really really rocks.