At the IAB Innovation Days event, part of Internet Week 2010, Major League Baseball Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman discussed his vision for where paid content is going.

WebNewser was there Wednesday at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City.

Bowman oversees one of the most successful efforts at getting users to pay for premium content in the digital space. MLBAM’s MLB.tv subscription service generates millions of dollars in revenue for the company, and also has one of the most popular paid apps on the Apple iPhone and iPad, MLB At Bat.

But success in the present does not guarantee success in the future, something that Bowman seemed acutely aware.

“We are in our tenth season, I am not sure we have a business model we can rely on, we change it all the time,” Bowman said.

The move by publishers and content owners to move to a la carte subscriptions concerned the executive, who noted that it has the potential to become a minefield for consumers.

“By the time you are done in this a la carte world, you are going to have 20, 25, 30 different types of things you are buying, and I am not sure that is sustainable,” he said.

The underlying point is that content in the digital media space is evolving at such a rapid pace that what works today may not work tomorrow. The owners of the “pipes” that allow that digital content to exist are changing their models as well, and it can have a ripple effect. AT&T is moving to a metered system for smartphone subscribers, capping use at 2GB a month. Bowman says that metered systems sound like what companies used to do in the past, and not something that is innovative and new.

But it looks like metering may be here to stay, and if it is, how will it affect content? That is the question, and Bowman is first to admit the folks at MLBAM don’t have the answer yet.