PVRs and VOD: happy together? VOD providers and vendors consider a time-shifted world.(personal...

If TiVo had never been invented, deploying VOD would be a much easier proposition today.

That may sound like a simplistic statement, but in many ways it is true. When the concept of on demand movies was first introduced, the idea was that cable operators would feed the content off large servers at the headend, and consumers would pay them for the privilege of watching it on a per-transaction basis.

Not many industry players had considered the possibility that by the time cable was deploying VOD en masse, a small but loyal band of consumers would already be e