Many technological advances are making video-on-demand (VOD) economically feasible for cable operators. Fiber rich architectures, the deployment of digital settops and dropping file server costs have resulted in virtually all of the major MSOs planning to either test or deploy VOD on their systems in the near future. Although capital costs have been dropping rapidly, operational expenses are still significant. The cost of encoding, distributing and loading content onto VOD file servers is a major expense if borne by a single operator.
One way to reduce these operational expenses is to spread costs across many systems offering video-on-demand. To this end, iN Demand has embarked on an effort to encode content to a single, open specification that works with a variety of file servers and settops, and then distribute that programming through a nationwide satellite network.