True video-on-demand (T-VOD) lets you browse, select, view, and scan through programs from a large content repository, at any time, without leaving your home. Imagine choosing and watching what you want, when you want it, and not be constrained by what the TV networks have chosen for you to watch. Actually, the dream of T-VOD has been in the public mind for more than a decade now, but in spite of today's technological advances, such a service is not cost-competitive to the combination of cable TV, digital video disk (DVD), and video cassette rental services. In the past, many researchers have suggested service aggregation to make VOD economical. To achieve aggregation requires us to make a number of assumptions about user behavior and content access patterns. In this article, I argue that these assumptions are impractical for VOD scenarios today. Existing proposals lack a strong business case that appeals to consumers and service providers alike. I present a radically different vision called timeshared VOD that can make commercial T-VOD a practical reality.
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