AOL's exploration of this amazing technology they've recently discovered (some call it broadband) continues, as the company focuses on content and ignores their product's high cost. "Hey, man," Shouts Dave Grohl of the band the Foo Fighters. "I'm live on A-O-L." The recent concert is one of several AOL has been offering to its broadband subscribers as part of a new push to be recognized as a haven for high speed content.

According to the Washington Post, the new hipster feel of AOL's broadband push can be placed in the lap of Jon Miller, the company's new CEO, and a man who last winter promised to put AOL Broadband on the map by offering a "walled garden" of exclusive content.

The problem comes not with content, but with AOL Broadband's prices, which amazingly stay static while 90% of their competitors offer more, for less. Their broadband service is among the priciest in the industry, and their monthly fees for dial-up are only a few dollars short of what the Baby Bells will soon charge for low speed DSL (SBC will soon announce a 384kbps, $25 per month package, Verizon's 1.5 package if bundled clocks in at $29.95).

AOL also hopes its $14.95 ($9.95 limited time promo) BYOA access plan will see growth, but that hinges on providing content not available via a million other web sources, and most users aren't likely to pay that charge on top of already existing broadband charges (though the service does have some un-advertised perks). Earlier this year, AOL Senior Vice President of Member Services Scott Falconer wrote to his fellow employees (in an internal document) that with the BYOA plan, AOL would be selling the "AOL experience"; providing things you couldn't find elsewhere.

But much of the time you can find better or similar content elsewhere (peer to peer, Apple's Quicktime Movie Trailer offerings, not to mention an endless sea of pay-video services like MLB.com and competitors like Yahoo and RealPlayer), and the days of convincing new web users that AOL is the internet are gone; AOL faces a more technologically savvy target audience this time around. While there are some interesting developments in the pipe, so far their "walled garden" of content has consisted of movie trailers and the occasional concert series.

Ironically, Time Warner's Roadrunner ISP has been doing quite well, and has signed up four times more broadband subscribers than AOL. What's more, neither company feeds off of, or directs customers to the other. In fact for the longest time, if you typed in AOL's corporate address into the Roadrunner "search for service" applet on their website, the applet recommended Adelphia as your best bet for service.

How exactly is it that a company which owns two ISP's, a cable company, and an endless sea of content backed by the largest media empire perhaps ever constructed on this planet, hasn't become a player in the broadband industry? It's truly a question for the great minds of our time.

According to David A. Gang, director of product development for AOL, "This is probably, in the decade we have been a real brand, the first craze we missed."

That's a pretty big "craze", Dave.