Jack likes to portray his Big Content overlords as benign patrons of the arts -- the people who are taking all the risks. this pioneering entrepreneurialism extends, apparently, to the world of consumer broadband:

As we speak, every one of the MPAA member companies is engaged in one or more of several ventures to make online digital video-on-demand a reality. They are moving forward with these ventures even in the absence of a proven market and even with broadband penetration at relatively low levels (and languishing in its growth by some accounts).

what do you want, Jack? a cookie?

let's leave aside for a second the relative risk to Big Content of bringing VoD to fruition compared to, say, starting a software company. the real knee-slapper is the idea of "the absence of a proven market": either people are downloading a petabyte per day of crappy, over-compressed video, or there's no proof of demand -- you can't have it both ways.