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Serendipitous surprises, like the unanticipated run on Home Box Office's subscription video-ondemand test in South Carolina a few weeks back, sometimes spawn all sorts of interesting developments.
As the story goes, HBO dangled ondemand viewing of Sex and the City and The Sopranos to 26,000 Time Warner customers in Columbia, S.C. About 3,000 HBO customers took the bait, for an 11.5-percent response rate. That alone is pretty amazing. But there's more: It all happened in less than two hours.
What happened next is the very reason these things are called tests: A frightful anxiety attack struck the headend equipment that sets up streaming sessions with set-tops. Way more people had arrived at the party than the headend controller ever anticipated, and it went into a tizzy, speaking in tongues. The server, hearing unintelligible babble from the controller, tuned out. Time Warner downshifted, startled, but well aware of the sweetness of the problem.
Whether you believe in subscription VOD, or in personal video recorders (PVRs, like TiVo), the effect on subscribers is essentially the same: They get to watch TV when it suits them. The effect of on-demand TV on cable technology is not the same, though. It requires...