Consider this scenario: You come home, flip on the television& and order, through your local cable company, a pay-per-view movie to watch that night. Instead of consulting the cable guide for movie times, you determine when you want to watch the movie, then lock in the delivery time with the press of a button on your television controller.
Once the movie begins, you needn't fear missing even a line of dialogue from an inopportune popcorn break or phone call. That's because you know you can hit the "pause" button at any time to temporarily freeze-frame your special-delivery movie, part a standard cable service that allows customers to see exactly what they want to see, when they want to see it.
Welcome to the world of "video-on-demand," an idea that has been more of a movieholic's dream than a technological reality.
Until now.
Comcast Cablevision, the cable provider in Baltimore County, plans to test market a video-on-demand service this summer. A similar test by Colorado-based Tele-Communications Inc. is set to get under way this summer in a Denver suburb.
The debut of video-on-demand will mark a milestone for the cable industry, which has been slow to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to new-age video services.
That is because, despite the hubbub over video-on-demand, cable companies still aren't sure how well the public will respond. As a result, cable companies have been slow to invest in the expensive new hardware that would be required to offer the services on a regular basis.
Comcast and Tele-Communications hope their trials will prove the market potential for the new service, allowing them to plan their capital expenditures accordingly.
On Wall Street, conventional wisdom holds that it isn't a matter of whether video-on-demand catches on but when.
"The biggest question now is the timing of how long it takes to become a big deal rather than if it will become a big deal," says Ned Zachar, a cable analyst with Duff & Phelps in Chicago. "The question is if the cable companies should make the investment [in new equipment now] or wait a few years. That's the issue they're trying to resolve in their minds now."
Comcast's trial service, which will be available to about 1,500 homes in Baltimore County, will allow customers to select movies and arrange show times around their own schedules. Viewers will get to pick from about 200 movie titles offered nightly and then schedule the movies to run any time during the 24-hour period.
As an added convenience, customers will be able to "pause" their pay-per-view movie at any time by hitting the pause button on the remote controller.
Comcast, which has 3 million customers nationwide, selected Baltimore County to introduce the service because of the size of the system and its relative proximity to company headquarters in Philadelphia, a company spokesman said. The Baltimore County system has 160,000 customers, making it Comcast's largest.
Although Comcast hasn't selected a test area, company officials are considering the more populated parts of the county, such as Towson, Catonsville and Essex. The service will be sold to the first 1,500 subscribers to sign up in the designated area.
Charges for the new service have not been determined, but a Comcast spokesman predicted that a movie would cost $3.99, the current rate for a pay-per-view movie.
If the trial goes well, the service will be continued and expanded as demand warrants and technological improvements allow.
The Tele-Communications trial will be limited to about 450 homes for an 18-month period. That trial will offer customers a choice of up to 2,000 movie titles.
Industry observers say video-on-demand offers a chance to meld the choice and convenience of a video store with the technological prowess of a billion-dollar cable system.
The combination could be potent enough to change the structure of the cable industry, said Hal Krisbergh, president of Jerrold Communications, a leading hardware developer for the cable industry. Jerrold, based in Hatboro, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, is providing equipment for the Baltimore and Denver trials.
"This is one of those major technological changes that changes the structure of the industry," Mr. Krisbergh said.
"It broad-jumps one of the key issues, which is what to do with all those channels. . . . Video-on-demand allows you to have whatever you want, whenever you want it," he said. "The technology allows the consumer to have, if you will, his or her own channel."
Jerrold and Comcast, which have a long history of cooperative ventures, are figuring out how to make the technological pieces fit together for this summer's test. Jerrold will provide the necessary hardware and software, and Comcast will implement and oversee the service.
Although the fine-tuning won't take place for several weeks, an early engineering plan reads like this: Wire neighborhoods with fiber optic cable, which has far greater capacity than traditional copper cables, and tie them into a central controlling area at Comcast. Electronically store 200 or more movies on tape or magnetic disc, then stockpile banks of laser disc players to play the movies.
Armed with those basics, Jerrold has several ways it can deliver video-on-demand to the home, explains Jeff Roman, vice president of technology and business development for Jerrold.
One way, he said, would be to set up laser disc players so that several dozen people can watch the same movie -- at different times -- off the same laser disc. Electronic heads, which guide the laser, could be programmed to start reading at different times, giving customers, in effect, their own dedicated movie channel. Under that configuration, customers could "pause" at will without disrupting other viewers, Mr. Roman said.
A second plan calls for scores of laser disc players to be loaded with the same movie and scheduled to begin at five-minute intervals. Once a "pause" signal is received, a customer's movie is automatically stopped. When the signal is canceled, the system picks up the same movie on another player that is at the point closest to the point when the pause signal was received.
There are a few wrinkles to be worked out.
Comcast's plan, for example, assumes that only a certain number of people will sign up for any one movie at any one time.
Comcast's prediction tool, in this case, is the same mathematical model used by the phone company to predict how many people are likely to use the phone at any given time. Based on those
predictions, the phone company decides how many circuits to install, and where.
When the volume of calls exceeds those estimates, customers get a fast busy signal, an indication that a phone system is overloaded.
So what happens if too many people order the same movie at the same time? Or, worse, what if all 1,500 customers in the test want to see different movies at different times? Will customers get a blank screen? Will they have to reschedule their show times to more mathematically desirable time slots (unraveling the video-on-demand aspect of the service in the process), or what?
"I don't know what would happen," said Jerrold spokesman Jim Barthold. "I guess that's what the trial is for. So we can find these things out."
A host of other technological and marketing details won't be resolved for several weeks.
Jerrold, which hopes to parlay the Baltimore trial into hardware orders from its cable customers, is talking with several other cable operators about deploying similar services. Mr. Krisbergh says cable operators are watching for results of the Baltimore trial before proceeding. He says he is confident that the trial this summer will prove that video-on-demand isn't just a good idea -- it's good business.
"Ten million in revenues for the video stores have proven that there is a demand for pay-per-view," Mr. Krisbergh says. "This is a type of pay-per-view. The only difference is that you get what you want, when you want it. . . . We have a confident feeling that there is a business here."