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TechLive tonight - "Video on Demand on the Way"
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Posted by: notydredz

From techtv.com
Video on Demand on the Way
"How soon will you be able to order your favorite television programs or movies with the touch of a button -- anytime, day or night? Well, it's coming to a digital set-top box near you sooner than you think."
www.techtv.com/news/shownotes/story/0,24195,3384390,00.html

I've heard a lot of talk about VOD over the pass couple of years, and honestly, I'm pretty excited about it. But I would like to know more. Will I finally be able to watch any show anytime I want without having to set up season passes, or worry about hard drive space or the last few minutes of the show being cut off. Don't get me wrong, I love my Tivo but if VOD does become a reality and an successful reality at that, How will it affect PVR's?
Would you choose VOD a PVR or both? Personally I think I would go the VOD route, since this is how I (and probably many other people) have always wanted television be to be.

Anyway, I plan to watch Techlive tonight in hopes that they will give some concrete info instead of the vague descriptions I've heard over the years. How much will it cost?, Who will provide the service, Who will manufacture the boxes? What type of content will be provided?

Posted by: BuggyBoyVT

Click on the "WWW" button above to see my website, click on WINfirst on the front page.

Posted by: bustergonad

Buggyboy,
Is your site down? I can't get on it....

Roy

Posted by: dd9

quote:
Originally posted by notydredz

www.techtv.com/news/shownotes/story/0,24195,3384390,00.html

Just when I thought I've seen the most annoying page ads ever, then this one comes up. It totally obscures the article.

Posted by: Dajad

PVRs like TiVo's Series 2 and beyond will be indespensivle to the true VOD expereince that we all envision of "everything on demand all the time". The Cableco's have no intention of providing that vision. They want to provided limited "walled gardens" of content for you to choose from that you can ONLY pick from what they offer and only pay their price.

A TiVo with Real One or the Radiance video on demand is likely more like a web browser. Just like a web browser can access content from anywhere in the world, an ideally developed TiVo system would be able to obtain any content from anywhere in the world And hopefully TiVo will get a revenue slice from that.

TiVo's PVR functions are critical to this vision in the short term given that real high quality video on demand through the Internet will NOT innitially be fast enough for real time playback through most broadband connections in the home today. Thus, TiVo can buffer shows as they download and you would be able to start watching them before the full datafile completed downloading ... just like you can now start watching West Wing before it's over.

Hence, to my mind, for the true VOD experiience of everything on demand all the time, we'll need Internet connected devices from TiVo so we can buypass the walled gardens of high priced VOD content that the cableco's intent to flog at us over the next 5 to 10 years.

...Dale

Posted by: BuggyBoyVT

quote:
Buggyboy,
Is your site down? I can't get on it....

Roy

Yeah, it was... Should be fixed now! :)

Posted by: jamesbobo

Comcast in my area already has video on demand. It's just for movies, for the time being, and costs from $2 to $4 per flick.
You can pause and rewind using onscreen menus. No, I haven't used it and don't plan to. If those people who use it think, "Hey, I wish I could pause and rewind all TV shows", maybe they'll buy a TiVo.
While I haven't ordered anything, I did take a look. Finding a movie you want is exasperating. You can't enter a movie by title since the remote has so letters on it. Instead, you have to scroll through a long list of films, if you're lucky, what you want starts with an 'A'. The TV screen only lists about five films at a time. To help narrow your serch, you can search by catagory, such as actiion, comedy, etc., but it's still a pain.

Posted by: hfwarner3

VOD means different things to different people. There are many different approaches to this:

1) DVD - that's right. If you want the show, buy it on DVD. There are some studios who actually see this as their VOD model.

2) Re-broadcast - A poor man's VOD. Cableco's like this one because it means more channels and the potential of charging subsciption for those channels. In this model, you take the most popular content from your "normal" channels and just keep re-broadcasting it over and over on these other channels for a short amount of time. (IMO, this is *NOT* VOD)

3) Video-on-request - aka video after demand. This is where you request a video and you get it a short time later. I have seen one cable company that used several pay-per-view channels to achieve this (most requested content broadcast first). Once they ran out of slots for the next 24 hours, they stopped taking requests. The problem here is that you had to wait up to 24 hours to get your video and you might get it at a time you could not watch it. With a PVR, this becomes a lot more powerful model. Also, instead of using PPV channels, you could distribute content using broadband connectivity where it takes longer to download the movie than it does to watch it. I see this as the most likely VOD in the near future.

4) VOD - you have a pipe that goes from your tv to a server farm full of content. You press a button on your remote and instantly start watching the content from that server farm. This is what most people think of when they hear VOD. There are a lot of technical issues to overcome here.