The Wall Street Journal reported in its Monday edition that Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network will make some of their shows available on-demand for $2.99 per episode. According to the article:

The episodes will be tailored to work exclusively on toy maker Hasbro Inc.'s VuGo portable media player, a kind of video iPod for kids that began appearing on store shelves in recent weeks and sells for about $100 at discount retailers.

In an earlier article, I said that I put an iPod with video playback on my Amazon.com Wish List because I concluded that "video playback is going to be a very hot feature of portable media players in 2006". This deal between Viacom, Time Warner, and Hasbro is another indicator of the willingness of media companies to offer content for use on portable media players.

I think some of these initiatives will prove that there's a market for inexpensive content delivered on-demand. This will result in the availability of a wider variety of content, which will be its own demand driver. Whether lots of parents will pay $2.99 per episode for the right to download SpongeBob SquarePants episodes to their child's VuGo Multimedia System remains to be seen. { Subscription required to read most articles in The Wall Street Journal. ]

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