As it happens, I do know a lot of people who would indeed like and use a service such as I have proposed (you might have assumed that I’d done this thinking in advance of writing my post). My Mum would love to be able to sit down and watch Brideshead Revisited on demand for example. My wife would probably watch One Tree Hill on demand until her eyes and ears bled if such a model were available. My brother-in-law would mainline 24 if it were available in such a format. And we haven’t even left the bounds of my family yet. There are many more examples. All of them would pay if the price were reasonable, and wasn’t based on the outdated concept of “owning” a copy of the content, rather than buying temporary access to it.

Your argument doesn’t work because otherwise there’s no way that Sky TV (in the UK) could ever have built the business they have done. Users already had the ability to “sit back and press one button” but Murdoch *launched something into space* and managed to carve out an enormously successful new business even so. Can you really believe that TV as it is currently conceived is ideal, and requires no innovation of any kind? That seems to be what you’re suggesting.

Hopefully you’re exaggerating when you say that your research shows that “99% of the time people want to sit back and press one button”. If you’re not, I don’t buy that for a second. Aside from mass panic, when does any large group of people behave in the same way 99% of the time? I think the reality is that user behaviour is nuanced, and that the concept of the “average user” is nonsense in the intenet age.

Besides, do you really think that the mouth-breathing couch-hogging simpleton with a remote that you imagine to be the average user is an attractive proposition to advertisers? Remember that TV has more than one user; the advertiser is just as important a person to impress as that passive entertainment consumer on the sofa. If the advertisers don’t see the viewers as having (in their ghastly terminology) valuable “eyeballs”, then TV companies are screwed, regardless of what the users want.