"As consumer's lives become increasingly connected, people will demand capabilities beyond the traditional hard drive," said Carl Howe, director, Anywhere Consumer Research, Yankee Group.
One significant claim for the environmental sustainability of ink jet printing is its "print-on-demand" capability.
"We'll see different boxes offering different functions," according to Sean Kaldor, vice president of developing markets and technology at research firm International Data Corp. "Some boxes will target the gaming market; others will feature video-on-demand capability, with prices tailored accordingly".
Although the broker in our model is only offering monthly options, in a practical implementation users would be free to purchase additional on-demand capability from the provider or broker for smaller units of time during periods where demand is above their current quota of options.
Comcast, for instance, introduced on-demand capabilities a decade ago.
Viewers connected to a cable television system with on-demand capabilities -- allowing them to stop and start a movie -- will have access to the films on Movies.com.
One-third of United States households now have on-demand capabilities, and Comcast said its platform recorded more than 300 million video views in March, up 50percentt over the previous year.
Digital video recorders, video-on-demand capabilities and streaming Web sites have given viewers command of what they watch and when, not unlike the way the invention of supermarkets gave food shoppers a panoply of new choices.
"This trend is driving the need for network cloud-based, on-demand capabilities such as utility computing.
He also said IBM's long-suffering PC division has implemented on-demand capabilities, which has helped the division narrow its loss.
