See my comment on the other post for an example of a small company that is already doing something similar.

Smaller companies are perfectly suited to this approach.

As for the LSE, you’ll have to ask them. It will be interesting to know what they say because of the obvious conflict of interest that exists between the Exchange as a disclosure standards setter and as a wire service owner via RNS. Same goes for NYSE Euronext and Hugin, and NASDAQ and PrimeNewswire.

What incentive do these for-profit exchanges have to approve new practices and innovations that reduce the need companies and investors have for the exchanges’ wire and IR services businesses?

Which is why I think exchanges owning wire and IR services is simply a bad idea.

Yes, companies would continue to use their own push tools, but not before the notice is distributed via a newswire.

At some companies (Sun Microsystems, for example), RSS and email alerts are ready to replace PR wire services, but we are not there yet for *all* companies. Most companies still don’t offer RSS, many don’t have email alerts and there are no dominant corporate RSS aggregators to make the process easier.

So this notice-and-access model keeps the existing system (which should please the wires), but makes it much cheaper for issuers and their shareholders without sacrificing utility for investors. We already use this model for webcast notices, for instance.