New Technology TV

VOD Technology Provides TV On Your Terms

New technology, and the Internet in particular, has made video entertainment that much more accessible to people in every walk of life. In fact, the wide variety of technology available these days can make it difficult to keep up with all of the options for enjoying great video.

Gone are the days when we were forced to choose between whatever happens to be on TV and our own modest collections of video tapes or DVDs! That's because of the growing availability of video on demand services. Video on demand is actually a broad range of technologies that can be used to deliver specifically requested video content to a viewer virtually instantly. Generally, this is done through a list of videos that are available in an archive.

Once the viewer has selected a particular video, that video is transmitted to the viewer's viewing device, which can be either a computer or a TV set. There are three general kinds of video on demand: streaming Internet video, the kind of video on demand that's available through cable TV providers, and the kind that's available through satellite TV companies. Streaming Internet video is by far the most widely available because in many cases it is free to anyone who has a fairly modern computer and high speed access to the Internet.

With the wide range of wireless hot spots available these days, one needn't have a broad band Internet connection at home to enjoy this technology! Basically there are free sites on the Internet that will provide streaming access to TV shows both modern and classic, in return for forcing you to watch some advertising. In most cases the advertising isn't as intrusive as it is on normal TV and you can initialize the stream whenever you want and pause it if you need to attend to something else momentarily.

Of course, there are also websites where you can pay for exclusive online streaming video as well. The kind of video on demand that you can get from your cable TV company is similar to what you can get through the Internet, but all of it is available through the cable provider's interface and some of it will be available only on a pay per view basis. Generally, video on demand from the cable TV company should be more reliable than streaming video from the Internet because there is much more bandwidth available through the cable TV connection.

The video on demand service of satellite TV companies is a bit different because satellite technology typically isn't set up to provide dedicated streams of programming to specific viewers. Satellite TV gets around this by storing video on demand content on viewers DVR's and allowing them to access that content on a pay per view basis. Because of the limitations on the storage capacity of the DVR's, satellite services have much less total video content available through their video on demand services than you can get from a cable TV company or over the Internet.