Will DirecTV Get Direct On Flix, Finally?

Nearly a year ago, DirecTV was touting its plan to offer a video-on-demand download service. It called it Direct Flix, in a financial conference in New York City.

The satellite provider hasn't said much of anything about its version of video-on-demand since that talk with Wall Street analysts last February.

But Rupert Murdoch's satellite TV service has a press conference slated for International CES, here. Up in the air will be whether DirecTV officials have any updates — or launch date — for Direct Flix in their talking points.

DirecTV's on-demand service would deliver content — be it movies or TV shows — via satellite to the hard drives of subscribers' digital recorders. That content would be stored on those hard drives until being retrieved by customers, who would use a high-speed Internet connection to request titles from a library of thousands of movies and TV programs.

With this game plan, DirecTV could compete with cable by marketing its own on-demand service without having to launch its own broadband product. That's because DirecTV subscribers could use their existing Internet connections to request programming from the satellite provider's on-demand library.

Last year, DirecTV officials also said a broadband video-on-demand service would be enabled by new high-definition versions of DirecTV set tops with digital video recorders.