Video-On-Demand Anxiety
from the well,-of-course dept
For years and years the next big thing was supposed to be "video on demand". It was going to change the way people rented movies. However, for every trial, there's been a failure story. Usually, it was because the technology was too complicated or didn't work right. In the end, consumers always lost interest. In it's latest version, the technology seems to be working, but the problems are coming from Hollywood, where they've severely limited the movies they'll license to be part of VoD programs. So, people who have signed up are realizing they were better off with a trip to the video store. The movie industry says they're worried about people with TiVos recording their shows and sharing them over the internet - which is a fairly ridiculous claim. In the meantime, I think TiVo-like devices may be the perfect vehicle for video-on-demand. If the networks and the studios teamed up with the PVR players, they could offer a much more user friendly system. Instead, you have different groups fighting each other because they want to "protect" their business model. What they don't seem to realize is that their old business model will go away anyway - so they might as well embrace the new business models before someone else embraces it for them.
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