Normally, I'd call Disney a great marketing firm - but they fall into the same "screw the customer" bucket as everyone else when it comes to video:

Walt Disney's ABC and ESPN are expected to announce Tuesday a deal with cable operator Cox Communications to offer shows on demand, but there's a catch. Cox will have to disable its fast-forward feature that lets viewers skip ads, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site Tuesday.

Next: Cox will start fielding lots of phone calls claiming that the remote is broken. This breaks expected behavior, and it's a fairly large UI error; the sort that really torques people off. This shouldn't be that hard, actually: cable companies can tell exactly which videos (owned by which entities) have been requested via Video on Demand. Some kind of subscription based revenue sharing plan would be pretty easy to do, and wouldn't piss off customers. But hey - media companies are now all about pissing off customers.

Technorati Tags: marketing