You might have read news coverage this week that the motion picture studios and cable companies are joining forces to “launch a $30 million marketing and promotion campaign touting the virtues of movies on demand” (See Multichannel News:” “Studios, Operators Team To Promote Movies On Demand“).

The three month, multi-media campaign titled “The Video Store Just Moved In” will shine a spotlight on the burgeoning movie on demand category, according to operator and studio executives. The campaign… will focus on the fun and ease of ordering and watching top theatrical movies at home as compared to trudging out to rent movies from the local home video store, according to campaign officials.

Developed in association with CTAM, operators participating in the campaign include Armstrong, Bend Broadband, Bright House Networks, iO TV, Comcast, Cox, Insight and Time Warner Cable. Studio partners include 20th Century Fox, Focus Features, Lionsgate, Rogue, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Summit Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros Entertainment, Inc.

In an odd bit of timing, I was reading Edward Jay Epstein’s 2005 book The Big Picture, which looks at the modern film business and how it got to where it is. The section on Steve Ross, who built Time Warner, had some relevant background.

To Ross, cable was much more than an alternative to broadcast television. For one thing, since there was room on cable for hundreds of different channels, it offered the potential for creating cable networks that segregated audiences by their particular interests for advertisers…

Another major application of cable, in Ross’s view, was as a means of delivering Warner Bros.’ movies into homes. When he had first been briefed by Warner Bros. executives about the plan to sell his company’s films to independent video stores… he shook his head in disbelief… He asked: “Can we really expect millions of busy people to get in their car, drive to a store, pick out a movie, stand in line, fill out a rental agreement, pay a deposit, drive home, play it on their VCR, and then, the next day, repeat the procedure in reverse to return it?” …he saw video rentals as a stopgap measure.

Ross saw the cable system he was assembling piece by piece as a far more efficient way of delivering films into homes on demand… Unlike over-the-air (including satellite) broadcasting, cable wiring could be used to send as well as receive signals. it could allow viewers, while watching programming on one channel, to signal back on another channel by clicking on their remote controls.

Of course, home video rental did become a big business, for a time, but that time may have passed. At the VideoNuze blog, Will Richmond noted:

Aside from whatever else can be said about Blockbuster in recent years – vast over-expansion, poor financial management, slowness to respond to new competitors like Netflix and Redbox – the company’s potential bankruptcy is surely one of the most vivid reminders of how much the movie rental industry has changed in the last 10 years and how much it is yet to change in the next 10 years. Blockbuster will likely be remembered as a temporary player that drove wider movie access in the analog era, but then got crushed as rentals shifted in the digital era.

It’s a reminder that cable technology, originally built just to retransmit broadcast signals to consumers, has moved way beyond that.

As a bit of a political junkie, I’m very excited to see the presidential debate tonight. I’ll be watching it on cable, as I watched the conventions on cable previously (Note my earlier post on the cable’s convention coverage).  You’ve got your choice of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, C-SPAN, Fox Business, and BBC America.

But suppose you can’t see it tonight. Or maybe you want to watch it over again tomorrow. Well, good news for Comcast cable subscribers. The three presidential debates, and the vice presidential debate, will be available On Demand, the day after their original broadcast. C-SPAN, Comcast Media Center and TVN Entertainment are teaming up to make the debates available to viewers. [I stand corrected. Other cable operators are also carrying the debates on Video on Demand as well. Check your local system.]

Comcast has already made On Demand programming available from the Democratic and Republican conventions, major speeches from the candidates and Spanish language content.

You may recall an earlier post on C-SPAN’s Convention Hub, which provided online coverage of the two conventions. Now they’ve launched Debate Hub, a one-stop shop for embeddable video of the debates, coverage from the blogosphere and a variety of other tools for broadband subscribers.

Features include:

• Embeddable video of all debates in their entirety from the C-SPAN Video Library. Users can edit, share and post this video on their own websites.
• Interactive timelines that allow users to watch the debate or read the transcript question-by-question and candidate-by-candidate.
• Word trees that give visual representations of the language used by each candidate throughout the debates.
• Aggregated blog and Twitter coverage of the debates, enabling users to follow the latest online debate news and analysis.
• Debate Cam, providing live streaming video from multiple locations including the debate hall, media filing center, protest area and on-campus debate watch parties.

And while it has nothing to do with cable, I have to give a shout-out to Twitter’s new Election 2008 portal, which allows you see tweets flowing by in real time.

A pretty hilarious moment (for me anyway) occurred on today’s edition of the syndicated television program Martha. During the last segment of today’s show, host Martha Stewart had her guest Sheraton Kalouria, the president of broadcasting for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, demonstrate how to use Video on Demand.

(If you’re somehow unfamiliar with VOD, read more here.)

The hook appears to be that Martha Stewart On Demand is now available through Comcast and Cox. In the segment (summarized here), Kalouria took remote in hand and showed Martha how to navigate through the menus and find the content you want, available for free.

The Martha Stewart On-Demand channel features a wonderful selection of things the company is best known for: crafts, weddings, pets, and food. Under each section is a selection of content from our programs, including “The Martha Stewart Show,” “Martha Stewart Living,” “Petkeeping with Marc Morrone,” and “Everyday Food.”

This is part of a growing trend of cable operators beefing up their VOD libraries to give more content to their customers. It was pretty funny to see a big media mogul like Martha scrolling through on-screen menus, but it was probably a great learning experience for her viewers to be exposed to the VOD platform.