With the widespread use of email and online streaming becoming common use, will this affect businesses in the U.S. severely in this dark economic time? Services like Netflix and Blockbuster run services that rely primarily on the U.S. mail system in order to reach its subscribers and deliver new content. With one less day available for delivery, this could potentially drive the costs of doing business up for these services, translating to higher subscription fees for the consumer.

Or would it? I question whether services like this would be affected as heavily with the new streaming options with iTunes and Netflix. Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation and the new Blu-ray and DVD players have cutting edge support for streaming movies and television episodes from these services. Will this ultimately replace the need for the mailed discs when a subscriber could just pull up a movie on-demand…without waiting for something via postal mail?

The streaming services will have lower overhead in the end for the business leasing the content, getting rid of the need for warehouses full of discs, postage fees and lost or damaged discs. The cost of doing business actually goes down by leaving the postal service model.

The next consideration is alienating your subscribers who cannot afford or do not qualify for high speed internet service yet. Not everybody has high speed access yet and that may put people off. So would the loss of another day really hurt these services? Will it annoy the subscribers? Would the ability to pay a slightly higher rate on postage be worth it?

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