.. well, "Yes" but with a ding in your pocketbook, to be sure.
Back at MIX08, Guy Kawasaki and Steve Ballmer touched on the value of a DVD player in a laptop, suggesting that, given the prospect of broadband ubiquity, the need for media-for-media's sake, may soon disappear, in favor of downloaded content for all with a big enough pipe.
Well, now it sounds like the cable companies are wise to this and are attempting to hamstring this effort by adding per-gigabyte charges to downloads. From the article:
Time Warner Cable had said in January that it was planning to conduct the trial in Beaumont, but did not give any details. On Monday, Leddy said its tiers will range from $29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap. Those prices cover the Internet portion of subscription bundles that include video or phone services. Both downloads and uploads will count toward the monthly cap.
Lessee .. this means an excess cost of about $1 per gigabyte. An HD video would cost around $8 per. Ouch.
Time Warner is starting a trial in Texas at the moment.
Yahoo News: "Time Warner Cable tries metering Internet use".