One of the big history features of the history of the internet so far, is that the company which starts up a particular part of the industry is rarely the company that sucseeds. I would be intrested if netflix is a An EBAY or a Lycos.

Usually this happens when a company kind of finds the flaws that doom a company-like myspaces reliance on html, or ASKS one type of search engine paradine.

That stated in the history of the interntet industry I don’t know where a big company provider has replaced its its indipendent startup.

Fascinating development.

The history of the cable systems regarding VOD has been to treat it like the black sheep of the family; most VOD permutations in people’s living rooms are seriously lagging in user-friendliness, usability, and attractiveness.

The cable industry was not aggressive about designing what consumers want, and that includes uncovering latent desires that consumers can’t clearly express now. The very real joke that movies beginning with the letter “A” have a big advantage in the VOD world is an indictment about how consumer-hostile the cable VOD customer-facing systems are.

Cable has shown itself to be moribund regarding consumers in this respect; it has not yet escaped the decades-old (and in Internet years, eons-old!) concept of sequential channels (Channel 1, Channel 2, Channel 3, ad infinitum) while our society has absorbed an entirely fluid method of tangential discovery (this looks good until I notice that and jump over to it until I notice something else and jump to it and click on something until I get distracted by something entirely different and then want to return to the third thing I was watching).

While the cable company feeds us alphabetical lists hidden behind layers of sub-menus, we instead want to immediately play “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” with our viewing choices. “Oh! Look at that bright shiny thing over there! I want it! NOW!” We want to drag a box with our finger onto another box and have it immediately show us what we seek.

Can cable climb out of the primordial ooze of its early ’70s history and move into the new world of 2010 usability? Here’s their chance. It will be fun to watch if Vutopia can develop into anything like utopia.

And I’m still wondering when they’ll figure out a way to make HD commonplace.

Amazon throws its hat in the ring too!

http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2010/12/07/wsj-amazon-developing-tv-movie-subscription-service