Hi Mike, a couple comments. When you say "...those 6 movies, taking up 38 channels are 'broadcast' video," remember this is only 3 or 4 physical channels (6 MHz channels), so at such an early point in the roll out there is probably no reason to change this.
I notice a couple times where you mention movies, you always refer to VCR tapes. I take it you don't have a DVD player? All the people I know that have a DVD player and multi-channel sound (i.e. a home theatre set-up) say they will never rent another tape again because there is no comparison to DVD.
I have no idea what percent of movie watchers fall into this category but I'm sure it's growing. From what I understand the selection of DVD movies is quite good now (over 9000 titles in US), and growing.
For people that fall into this category, VoD in the manner you describe probably isn't much of an attraction. When VoD consists of DVD selections then they might have interest. But that has issues of its own, including more bandwidth per movie and content scrambling. Eventually I think they (TWX) will have to start doing this though, because DVD (earlier this year) became the most successful consumer product ever, based on fastest to 10 million player sales[ thedigitalbits.com ].
So arguably, the TWX VoD is delivering an obsolete product, or at least one that is in decline. Sorta like selling records vs. CD's.
The other thing I'd comment on is that most of the big movie watchers seem to have developed into a routine of going to the video store so I'm not so sure that is a big issue.
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On your VoD, can you describe the pause, rewind and fast-forward operation and quality (how much delay, how choppy, video quality during ff/rw). |
