I'll suggest again that maybe this is can be seen as a marketing problem as much as a technology problem. Perhaps the current log-jam of the last mile could be cleared with a set-top recorder box designed for an integrated system. You won't have just 9 homes out of 500 wanting to watch a pre-ordered movie on Saturday night. But what if you ordered it a day or two ahead, and it downloaded based on available space. (To encourage people to do this, and to make more money, you would charge an extra dollar for rush orders). There are 168 hours in a week for downloading, and at first there certainly would be fewer than all subscribers on a node using the service.
The movie would be saved on a TIVO type box. TIVO type box, integrated into a cable box, would cost ~ $500-600, with prices dropping all the time. I think people would pay, as they would get pretty good function that could be the only box they needed. It's a set-top box. It's better than VCR for recording TV, better than VCR for watching rented movies, and would lessen the perceived need for DVD. Some people who now have three boxes might be satisfied with having only one box.
From the cable operators point of view, there is a question of their money. They would lose some premium channel subscribers (existing subscribers who drop premium when special order is made available), but they would gain other subscribers (those who subscribe for the new features). I believe that the relative margin on premium channels is not so great, and that cable operators pay for the movies based on the number of subsribers to the premium services. On the other hand, they'd charge something like $10/month or more just for access to special orders, and that would be pure profit.
I wish those cable operators would make a commitment and go for it. Waiting for VOD is problematic for several reasons, most particularly the need to build out more capacity and the glitches in service (presuming it suffers the same tendency to slow down or stop for reasons mystifying to the end user).
Just my 2 cents. All I have left after Greenspan today. |
