So, how does this work exactly? If they have a satellite do they continuously repeat hit movies for the units to automatically record, and work in the lesser movies that users request? So, if you ask for movie X it says it will be available at approximately Y time/date in the future? If they had more HD space it would seem to be better, 500mb does not seem like much if you do not want to repeat movies often.
They surely are not beaming down any movie you want and you are able to start watching immediately. Assuming a Ku-FSS satellite, the entire satellite dedicated, they could probably beam down an average of 20-30 movies/hour in BD/HD-DVD quality (assuming 24 5mbyte/sec streams, 300Mbyte/min, 18GB/hour). If they were smart they could have lets say 8 TPs doing the top 200 movies, each movie would only be about 24 hours away. You would rent the day before to get it downloaded. The rest of the satellite could handle the odd requests. Given 16 streams, they could probably do 400 movies a day, your rental could take anywhere from 1-3 days. Unless of course they want to deliever unpopular movies via broadband.
But even if it takes 3+ days to get a movie it could still be faster than netflix. Especially if you have the hard drive space and can order a bunch at once and have them come in over time as you have space.
It would be a very interesting problem to find the optimal solution for. The more popular the movie the more repeats one would need. You need some very intellegent tracking software to keep track of what everyone wanted, the more a movie is wanted the faster it needs to get played, yet you do not want to keep anyone waiting forever.