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Not necessarily a new idea. Just an old idea repurposed to fit a legal loophole instead of a technical need. From Wired Sept 1994, Fran-On-Demand: http://www.w
by candeira 16y ago
Not necessarily a new idea. Just an old idea repurposed to fit a legal loophole instead of a technical need.
From Wired Sept 1994, Fran-On-Demand:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/cable.labs.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/cable.labs.html
"When an order for, say, Coneheads, comes in, she rushes to the giant videotape library on the far wall, retrieves the correct title, and hurries to insert it into the appropriate place in a gleaming bank of VCRs. During prime-time hours, two people share this job. But right now, on a Wednesday afternoon, it's all Fran.
Fran may or may not realize that her job category will soon be phased out. Her employer, cable colossus Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), is conducting this market test with AT&T and US West. But all the other interactive television trials just getting underway are powered by computers, not by people like her."
The article ends in a chowderish claim:
"Watching any movie, any time - video-on-demand - is supposed to be the killer app that propels dozens of new interactive TV services into American homes by the end of the century. The home shopping, the custom news programs, the play-along game shows, the dozen or so simultaneous football games, the home banking, the on-demand Roseanne, the whole 500-channel scenario that cable companies have been hyping - all of this is supposed to piggyback on the raging success of movies-on-demand. But there's one glitch: there's not much demand for movies-on-demand"
TV's problem has ended up not being lack of demand, but disaggregation. People want movies on demand, and they can get them better and cheaper from companies that aren't in the traditional "TV business".
The same is happening all around. Newspapers' incomes are not down due to lack of demand for classifieds. It just happens that people who used to pay newspapers to print classifieds now post them somewhere else.