Video On Demand - History

History

From September 1994, a VOD service formed a major part of the Cambridge Digital Interactive Television Trial in England. This provided video and data to 250 homes and a number of schools connected to the Cambridge Cable network (later part of NTL, now Virgin Media). The MPEG-1 encoded video was streamed over an ATM network from an ICL media server to set top boxes designed by Acorn Online Media. The trial commenced at a speed of 2 Mbit/s to the home, subsequently increased to 25 Mbit/s. The content was provided by the BBC and Anglia Television. Although a technical success, difficulty in sourcing content was a major issue, and the project closed in 1996.

In 1998, Kingston Communications became the first UK company to launch a fully commercial VOD service and the first to integrate broadcast TV and Internet access through a single set-top box using IP delivery over ADSL. By 2001, Kingston Interactive TV had attracted 15,000 subscribers. After a number of trials, HomeChoice followed in 1999, but were restricted to London. After attracting 40,000 customers, they were bought by Tiscali in 2006 who were in turn bought by Talk Talk in 2009. Cable TV providers Telewest and NTL (now Virgin Media) launched their VOD services in the United Kingdom in 2005, competing with the leading traditional pay TV distributor BSkyB. BSkyB responded by launching Sky by broadband, later renamed Sky Anytime on PC. The service went live on 2 January 2006. Sky Anytime on PC uses a legal peer-to-peer approach, based on Kontiki technology, to provide very high capacity multi-point downloads of the video content. Instead of the video content all being downloaded from Sky's servers, the content comes from multiple users of the system who have already downloaded the same content. Other UK TV broadcasters have implemented their own versions of the same technology, such as the BBC's iPlayer, which launched on 25 December 2007, and Channel 4's 4oD (4 On Demand) which launched in late 2006. Another example of online video publishers using legal peer-to-peer technology is based on Giraffic technology which was launched in early 2011 with large Online Video-on-Demand publishers such as US based VEOH and UK based Craze's OnlineMoviesBox movie rental service. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 planned to launch a joint platform provisionally called Kangaroo in 2008. This was abandoned in 2009 following complaints investigated by the Competition Commission. That same year, the assets of the defunct Kangaroo project were bought by Arqiva, who used the technology behind Kangaroo to launch the SeeSaw service in February 2010. A year later, however, SeeSaw was shut down from lack of funding.

VOD services are now available in all parts of the United States,which has the highest global take-up rate of VOD. In 2010, 80% of American Internet users had watched video online, and 42% of mobile users who downloaded video preferred apps to a normal browser. Streaming VOD systems are available on desktop and mobile platforms from cable providers (in tandem with cable modem technology) who use the large downstream bandwidth present on cable systems to deliver movies and television shows to end users, who can typically pause, fast-forward, and rewind VOD movies due to the low latency and random-access nature of cable technology. The large distribution of a single signal makes streaming VOD impractical for most satellite TV systems. Both EchoStar/Dish Network and DirecTV offer video on demand programming to PVR-owning subscribers of their satellite TV service. Once the programs have been downloaded onto a user's PVR, he or she can watch, play, pause, and seek at their convenience. VOD is also quite common in more expensive hotels. VOD systems that store and provide a user interface for content downloaded directly from the Internet are widely available.

According to the European Audiovisual Observatory, 142 paying VOD services were operational in Europe at the end of 2006. The number increased to 650 by 2009.