Single urban dwellers might be familiar with his situation: On your way home, you run to the grocery store to get ingredients for a nice home-cooked dinner, maybe a bottle of wine, and a TV guide for nightly home entertainment overview. While the meal is roasting in the oven, you check what's on tonight and after reading through dozens of channels, you realize that the most interesting program would be a movie from the 1940s showing at 2 o'clock in the morning.

A probable solution for this rather serious problem was recently introduced by Walt Disney Corporation. Instead of using their websites strictly as a marketing tool, Disney tested the web for distributing popular TV shows such as "Desperate Housewives". According to the company, it was a big success. In two months, 1 million visitors per day downloaded 37 million programs. Downloading was for free, only one commercial was built in per series. This is Disney's answer to P2P file-sharing networks!

Other companies have already joined in to reform the home entertainment industry. Disney, Intel, Cisco Systems, and other Silicon Valley partners founded the video-on-demand-service MovieBeam. It requires a 160 GB hard drive receiver which is priced at approximately $200. Around 100 movies are pre-installed; via antenna 10 new movies are loaded onto the unit each week. Pricing for a film is moderate, ranging from $1.99 to $4.99 depending on release date as well as format.

Do home entertainment innovators aim to outdate your regular TV guide copy? Whoever wants easy access to all Hollywood blockbusters might think about getting on-demand-services such as MovieBeam. On the other hand, there are fans of alternative movie productions as well as your regular TV junkies. Therefore, consumers will accept on-demand technology like other new forms of media that have come up: As an additional option. I mean, we still read books, right?