New delivery architectures, better navigation software and more powerful set-tops will combine to improve the breadth and quality of video-on-demand programming offered to consumers, according to cable executives speaking at the B&C/Multichannel News OnDemand Summit in Philadelphia last week. The improvements should also boost on-demand revenues for operators and programmers, either by growing transactional pay-per-view revenues or making it easier to sell targeted ads against free on-demand fare. Bob Benya, senior VP of on-demand product management for Time Warner Cable, notes that VOD delivery systems are moving to a "CDN-like model" as they scale up to handle more content. Cable operators like Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Cox have created, or are building, massive centralized VOD libraries that can pump content to local servers. Such hierarchical storage architectures place different types of content on different storage media, such as long-tail fare on hard disk and the most popular titles on flash memory.
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