Although technology promises much for the keen movie watcher, roll-out of the service is still in its early stages, writes John Collins

If ever there was a technology that promised much but seems to have taken forever to deliver, it is video on demand.

Touted since the late 1980s, the first commercial services emerged in Asia in the early 1990s. Irish consumers are still waiting for the first widely available service that will allow us to watch what we want when we want.

Video on demand, as the name suggests, enables you to summon up a movie or other video content which is then delivered over broadband pipes for instant viewing.

The good news is that a number of services are expected to come on stream in Ireland in the coming months. The bad news is that nirvana for couch potatoes - the choice of thousands of Hollywood blockbusters and old classics without having to wander down to your local Xtravision - is still some way over the horizon.

Magnet Entertainment last month launched the first video on demand to television service - albeit on a very limited basis. It is currently only available to 100 homes in the Dunboyne Castle estate in Co Meath, where Magnet has rolled out high capacity fibre optic cables to each of the houses.

Magnet is currently engaged in a network roll-out and its US parent company, Columbia Ventures Corporation, has committed €65 million to rolling out its broadband-based services in the Republic.

According to Charlie Ardagh, sales and marketing director of Magnet, when the exercise is completed in the coming months it will have an addressable market of "up to 700,000 homes in the major metropolitan markets".

About 15 per cent of these homes will have fibre to the home, while the remainder will be able to get Magnet's services thanks to local loop unbundling .

This means that Magnet is working with Eircom to place its own equipment in telephone exchanges in Dublin, Galway, Cork, Limerick and Waterford.

Homes served by these exchanges will be able to sign up for digital television, broadband, phone services and video on demand, which will be delivered using high speed ADSL 2+ broadband technology, which Ardagh says will deliver speeds of up to 25 Mbits/sec.

While Magnet has been first to market with video on demand delivered to television sets, Sky has been quietly offering an on demand service to PCs since last year. Sky by Broadband lets subscribers with two or more of its premium channels download sports and movie content to a single nominated PC.

Screenclick.com, the Irish online DVD rental service recently acquired by British company LoveFilm.com, will also start offering a PC-based video on demand service next month according to its chief executive Frank O'Grady.

He says the company is examining introducing a set-top box later in the year which would allow movies to be streamed directly to televisions in the home.

"It won't be our core business but we want to introduce the technology early with a quality service," says O'Grady.

"In five or 10 years time, this is what most people will do rather than going to a video shop."

Sky has not made any announcements about plans to expand its content on demand services to its set-top boxes. However, industry watchers believe it is likely to introduce something this year using the spare hard drive capacity in its Sky+ boxes, which allow customers to record content directly to a hard drive in the box.

It is understood this would be a limited service initially, with the top five movies downloaded to the hard drive in advance so that they can be instantly accessed when required.

Personalisation technology will mean that horror fans, for instance, would have the top films in that genre seeded on their set-top box.

Given that Sky is introducing new higher capacity Sky+ boxes, it is not expected that the new service will reduce the current recording capacity.

Surprisingly, Ireland's two largest cable TV operators - NTL and Chorus - have yet to announce any plans in this area. The situation has been complicated by last year's acquisition of NTL by UGC Broadband, which already owns Chorus, and it plans to merge the two firms.

Mark Mohan, marketing and sales director of NTL Ireland, said: "We are investing significantly in a high-speed fibre optic network so that we can provide a full range of triple-play [voice, data and video] services to our customers. Video on demand is an example of our many future services and is designed to give customers a new level of control over their television viewing."

While the availability of broadband has been the main technological hurdle, the next issue will be getting buy-in from the movie studios and other content owners.

As anyone with a video iPod will know, getting easy to download, legal video content onto your iPod can be a challenge. When attempting to add content from Apple's iTunes, Google Video or other legal services, Irish users are regularly met with messages that the content is not available in this State.

While television stations and movie studios have been more progressive in addressing the new business models opened up by broadband than the music industry, they still have major concerns over privacy. They want to be assured that content providers have the necessary digital rights management software in place to ensure that videos cannot be shared without them receiving a cut of the revenue.

O'Grady says that Screenclick hopes to launch its service with a selection of new releases from Warner Bros with new titles being added shortly after they become available in traditional video rental outlets. Using DRM technology developed by LoveFilm, the movie can be watched within one week of downloading it, but it will be deleted 24 hours after it is watched in its entirety.

Sky by Broadband launched with just over 200 movies including Hollywood blockbusters such as Spider-Man 2 and old favourites such as Dr Strangelove, although it has said it plans to expand this to over a thousand titles "over time".

Magnet's service currently offers films, television series and documentaries, although the quality of its movie content in particular, which is mostly older releases, has been criticised in some quarters.

Ardagh says Magnet is actively engaging with the local film industry to get more content on-board.

"As an industry we need to evangelise this and get the producers to realise that video on demand is just like DVD without the CD," he says.