"They thought video on demand would be a killer app... but it never caught on"

OK. The late 80s, early 90s experiments with the cable company offering "interactive Tee Vee", a.k.a. "video on demand" never caught on. That was almost a cliche by 1995.

So what's different now? Netflix on-line streaming videos is quite nice, and so successful that the shadowy "movie studios" are starting to strangle it by making it pull movies every so often, etc etc.