I’m a DirecTV customer. They’ve taken a somewhat unique approach to offering VOD. They have their customers provide an Internet connection and all of the VOD content comes to the customer from DirecTV over that pipe. DirecTV doesn’t use their satellite infrastructure to deliver the content. So this means that the faster your Net connection, the sooner you get your VOD content. Most people don’t like to wait, so just maybe that will spur them to pay the price for faster Net connections.

I’m part the DirecTV beta testing group and we get new firmware loads for our DVRs just about every week. We currently are testing out downloading HD content encoded as 1080p. These are large files that take a long time to download, again this being dependent upon the speed of your pipe. When DirecTV rolls this out nationwide and makes more 1080p content available via VOD, you can see where this is all going to go. The bandwidth demands on the telco and cableco Net infrastructures is going to go thru the roof!

Now Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of Dreamworks is talking about the rollout of 3D HD to theaters: , coupled with the possibility that the gaming industry will be the first to bring that technology into the home. Its not hard to project what the bandwidth requirements will be for such content. So it seems to me that the need for 1 Gbps to the home, kinda soon now, is not that farfetched.