More and more television programming and movies are available online, through sites including Hulu, Netflix Watch Instantly, YouTube and Amazon.com's Video on Demand. "This time there is a real, viable alternative" to cable, said Bobby Tulsiani, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Time Warner Cable, which operates under the Road Runner brand, said it has been offering tiered, capped service in Beaumont, Texas for some time and in March began testing that pricing in four new markets: Austin and San Antonio, Texas; Rochester, New York; and Greensboro, N.C. Still unpriced is Time Warner's maximum available offering: 100 GB per month, said Time Warner Cable spokesman Alex Dudley. Usage exceeding those caps is charged at $1 per gigabyte.

Others among the nation's largest ISPs are also experimenting with caps and tiers.

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Update.

Time Warner decided to discontinue their experiment with caps and tiers on bandwidth use.

The viewer is charged by Time Warner Road Runner ISP. $1 per gigabite will easily cost the viewer two or even 5 bucks to view a high quality mpeg-4.

Since Time Warner Video is loosing money on VOD they try to charge for "free" view of the content through Time Warner's ISP.

who is being capped/charged per gigabyte, the content provider or the viewer? why wouldn't they use Amazon S3?

Am I missing something?