Video on Demand

Video on Demand ...... what is it??

First and easiest is "near VoD". This is what the Cable TV companies typically provide. Normally you will have a choice of times to start your video. For example you could choose "Gone with the Wind" to start at 8.00, 8.15, 8.30 or 8.45. What the Cable TV company does is to broadcast the film over its network on 4 different channels, starting each at slightly different times. Essentially you are choosing which channel you will watch the film on and have no control over it once it has started.

"True VoD" is much more technically complex and much more flexible. True VoD allows the user to not only start the video when they like, but also to pause, rewind and fastforward. Other users can simultaneously be watching the same video with no loss of quality. This is done by placing digitised video onto a video server. A video server is basically a kind of PC with a very large hard disk memory and special software to allow multiple users to simultaneously access the information on the disk. The Cable TV companies in Australia are not able to support this type of VoD over their current customer networks, although this may change in the future. For the moment it is better suited to computer networks, which means that True VoD is usually seen on PC screens rather than on televisions. True VoD is therefore more likely to develop within corporate Local Area and Wide Area Networks, possibly migrating to the internet if technology and bandwidth permits. True VoD is a powerful and flexible communication media and as technology, computer processing power and network infrastructure develops, so it is likely to become more widely accepted and used.

The power of this technology does not lie solely in video delivery, but in the fact that it represents complex two-way digital interactivity. The applications of the future which will be using this type of technology will be banking, shopping, application sharing, training video, help bureau and other services.