Apple Strikes, Again. The amazing Steve Jobs is parlaying the I Phone into an entire new universe of communication and product delivery. He has forced the music business, looted by piracy, to allow sales of songs for $.99. He has now virtually tied up the movie delivery to homes direct from studios. So what's next? Another new company with another new idea.

Five years after the Apple grab of music it's the television show's turn. Streaming Web video and TiVo (nasdaq: TIVO - news - people ) have broken consumption into bite-size views and called into question the concept of a television channel. Piracy is rampant. Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) is applying the same pressure to sell individual episodes, for $1.99. "In an on-demand world, a channel is nothing more than a playlist of shows," says Wiser.

Yet he is convinced the cable networks are going to stave off obsolescence for a very long time. No one has the muscle to duplicate Jobs' feat of legitimizing the end of the CD. The TV networks from NBC to ABC to TBS to FX are fighting tooth and claw to maintain the primacy of the network brand and to avoid giving iTunes (or any other distributor) power over their retail pricing.

So Wiser and his business partner, Buno Pati, identified a different profit pool to drain: the billions now captured by the nation's cable and satellite giants. Later this year Wiser and Pati will turn on the Sezmi network, a radical broadcast system that will, they promise, deliver TV shows to most big U.S. markets for roughly half the monthly cost of cable and satellite.

Unlike struggling Internet-based "add-on" services such as CinemaNow, Amazon Unbox and AppleTV, Sezmi aims to replace the cable or satellite box completely. Continued