VOD vs. HD-DVR

One of the hot topics at the cable industry's annual confab in Atlanta last week was video on demand (VOD), which frankly, has been the case for at least the last three years. It got me thinking, though, about VOD's biggest problem: the vast majority of such programming is unavailable in high-def. If you believe the CEA that 2006 will be the first year that digital TVs outsell analog models - they project that a total of nearly 16 million HDTVs will be sold this year -- then you might assume that the cable industry would do more to get HD programming into VOD. Not so.

The issue, as it always seems to be with the cable industry, is bandwidth. Most of the cable providers have largely ceased adding new HD channels over the past year due to bandwidth constraints, and the same problem is hindering any significant amount of HD VOD. So as an HD aficionado, my cable company's VOD is pretty unappealing. In theory, VOD should enable me to not care when this week's episode of a program like The Sopranos airs because I can always go to the On Demand menu and pull it up whenever I want. In theory. However, because I want to watch it in high-def, you better believe that I care when it's on and that I make sure to set the HD-DVR to record it.

Some backers of VOD have made the argument that there is no competition between that technology and DVR because of the vast library of programming that can be offered via VOD. While to some extent that may be true, that argument only holds if the programming is offered in the format that viewers want. And this much I know: we use our HD-DVR literally every day and I can't remember the last time we watched a program live (other than sports). But we've only used our cable company's VOD offering a couple of times and each time were fairly underwhelmed. The vast majority of programming we watch here at home is in HD and until more of it is available in high-def via VOD, we'll stick with our HD-DVR.