Over at TCS Daily, Ed Driscoll takes a look at the state of independent online video and declares that the days of the one-man TV network are “coming soon.”

Ed interviewed me for the piece, and I obligingly supplied him with this rah-rah quote:

Ten years ago, the expense associated with putting together even the most rudimentary online video would have put it out of reach for most people. Even if you had your own camera, you probably didn’t have video editing software or a computer capable of running it. If you did have access to an editing suite, then you probably didn’t have sufficient bandwidth to make the resulting video available online. And even with unlimited bandwidth, the people on the other end — the potential viewers — probably didn’t have enough bandwidth to watch what you made. Today, however, none of those are limiting factors. You can buy a usable consumer-level DV camera for around $500. You can buy a “pro-sumer” DV camera for under $3000. You can even shoot in high-definition HDV for under $5000.

And near-ubiquitous bandwidth availability is also a factor. Although high-speed broadband has been available in most corporations for a few years, broadband is just beginning to penetrate the home market in large numbers. This means that we’re really at the very beginning stages of mass viewing of online videos. We haven’t hit the inflection point yet, but I suspect we’ll see, within a few years, the same massive growth with online video that we saw with the web in the mid-1990s. Eventually, maybe 10 years from now, we’ll have full-screen, full-motion on-demand high-definition video available directly to the home [via the Web]. That’s the ideal video delivery platform, and if we’re still a decade away, it means there’s plenty of room to grow in this market.

My favorite quote from the piece, however, is Driscoll’s closing: “If Dan Rather could host a TV show for 25 years, why not you?”