From the NYT:

In a seller’s ideal world, the product is paid for first, then manufactured and shipped. The sellers of television on DVD are trying to create that world: ABC Television, Amazon.com and a subsidiary, CustomFlix Labs, a DVD manufacturer, announced Thursday that they were going to make shows from the archives of ABC News available on demand.

So when a history buff wants to buy a DVD about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, they will order it on Amazon.com or ABC.com, pay for it, then wait two or three days for delivery. The DVD will be copied from digital files stored at CustomFlix only when the order has been placed, and the seller incurs none of the costs of inventory and warehousing.

The market potential for on-demand DVD sales is considerable. For Amazon alone, projected sales of DVDs should be just under 5 percent of its $7.6 billion domestic sales revenue in 2007, said Aaron Kessler, a senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. On-demand doesn’t make sense for books, he said, but it does for infrequent orders on DVD or CD.