Great post over at bowblog, describing the inability of UK cable to harness PVR technology, and criticising the industry for its VOD efforts.

You should also check out PWC�s recent cable industry review entitled - �Big Bets for the U.S. Cable Industry�. (Colourful, full of tables, and loaded with predictions - It looks like something Ofcom would have authored!) Some nuggets:

* The average American household now receives about 100 video channels (out of a universe of more than 300).

* 86 percent of American households are multi-channel (67 percent of those are cable, the remainder are mostly satellite or new technologies).

* Overall, PWC does not expect either multi-channel household penetration or channel availability to increase significantly, or play a significant part in new revenue opportunities.

* The market size? Well, the so-called �triple-play� (cable TV, internet and internet telephony), which most U.S. cable companies can already deliver, will be $160 billion in 2008. Add mobile telephony to that and the buffet size increases to $275 billion.

* Near term growth for the industry will not be video-related, but services such as internet telephony.

* HDTV is the �gold standard� and will increase in penetration from 8 percent of households today to about 53 percent of households by 2008. [Comment: I think there will be more robust take-up than PWC predicts. Every guy I know drools over these HDTV sets in BestBuy.]

* Page 31 gets to Steve Bowbrick�s issue of DVR versus VOD. You can easily spot what may be the answer to the riddle of why the cable industry probably prefers VOD � technical control over advertising (ability to limit advert-skipping and deliver customised adverts). Actually page 34, figure 7 covers this nicely.

* My criticism of the report. While PWC mentions �games� a few times in the report, it underreports what is otherwise the most important interactive media trend in recent years. Video games, and consumers increasing interactive play on broadband platforms. Case-in-point: HALO-2. When Bill Gates was doing Microsoft�s press activities associated with CES earlier this month, he said something like XBOX-Live users played 69 million online hours of HALO-2 over a two-month period. 69 million hours! That�s one video game. On one platform for a period of less than 60 days. Not counting the millions of hours gamers played off-line. That number just staggers me.

Stay tuned, folks�