Arnold Kling with some reality for the video on demand crowd:
But I am skeptical of any study that forecasts a big market for movie video-on-demand. That forecast has been made wrongly for years, and it continues to defy the fact that hard disk space is increasing faster than bandwidth.

I think that the correct answer to the question, "When will video on demand become mainstream?" is "Never."  By the time we have the bandwidth to make it work, we will have hard drives capable of storing all the movies ever made.

- jim 9-08-2003 5:19 pm

The model that some people advocate is a tiny little device, a dongle for the TV, that takes in IP and puts out video. I can understand the appeal of that model, but it didn't fly in the Bell Atlantic trials in Dover Township back in the mid nineties, and I remain skeptical. Perhaps I'm embittered by living in a 132 kbps ghetto, but most people make do with 56k or less. The fat pipes for IP just aren't in place.

The fat pipes that do exist are broadcast channels, i.e. satellite, cable, terrestrial. But it just so happens that most people want to watch roughly the same "stuff", so broadcast works just fine.

With a 100 channel cable system, one could receive about 17,000 hours of TV each week. That's more "stuff" than most of us can really handle. With a little training, a Tivo can pare that down to just the "good stuff". WIth a 100 G disk, one could maintain a cache of over 100 hours of the good stuff.

And for those eccentric types that want obscure content (e.g. British Touring Car Championship racing), IP is a great alternate path. And because the big disk caches the content, a fat IP pipe isn't needed.

- mark 9-25-2003 1:56 pm





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