Hopefully the market can make a seamless transition to the Crunchyroll/whatever online subscription format and not splinter into a million little nickel-and-dime pieces. Because I can pay $5/mo to watch the shows I want. Five here to watch one, and there to watch another, and way over there for a third... not happening.
I remember cheerleading official anime download services long before they appeared. Another successful JDea.
I've been pessimistic about subscription services, though. I'll buy
Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei at $2/episode, sure, because for $2 I get it concurrent with the Japanese release, professionally translated and on a reliable download, none of which are guaranteed by a fansub. It's the same successfull business model of D&D PDF sales, or even Steam.
But subscription, this places you at the mercy of the publishing website. There's diminishing incentive to a single service offering twenty series instead of five; odds are I only like a few series, or only have time to enjoy a few. What will happen there is that you'll see multiple subscription services, each with their own set of series, and you'll have to subscribe to them all to get the shows you want, and put up with whatever idiosyncrasies each publisher settles with - web-only, dodgy subtitle font, encodes in MOV or whatever.
The best solution might be to offer individual episodes for $5, a subscription to a series amounting to $2 or $3 per episode and offered retroactively to subscribers who start mid-way, a series-end sale price meeting or exceeding the subscription price, and a more expensive no-holds-barred monthly license affording access to all series released for its duration.
