Video on Demand gets in gear, but only in the USA

Things are always better in America; well apart from grammar, cheese, gun crime......oh never mind. Anyway the point is that video on demand is starting to have a noticable impact in the USA.

According to this story the takeup of pay TV in the USA is dropping and one of the reasons is that people can get stuff for free over the internet. What the story does not really spell out is that people are prepared to pay to use sites like Netflix (which presumably do not count as 'Pay TV'). Whether free or not the point is that people prefer to select what they view and when it starts. Suffering brain death while consuming the output of certain channels is not really healthy at all.

Apple have also noticed this trend and are supposedly about to revamp Apple TV. Whether this will go anywhere is debatable. The death of Apple TV has long been predicted by the pundits. As usual the service will not be available in the UK.

We have observed before that a major stumbling block in the UK is the grip that the major channels have on copyright rights. This is what stopped Hulu launching a service here. A way round this obstacle needs to be found.