[2] The origins of the service (which is/was unrelated to Canada's Viewers Choice) date back to 1978 and the well-known interactive television experiment in Columbus, Ohio, Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment's QUBE system.

[3] The service was launched nationally via satellite to cable companies in six states on November 27, 1985, with one channel of pay-per-view content, still under the Viewer's Choice name.

Also in 1988, VC merged with a competing PPV service, Home Premiere Television, a joint venture of multiple cable companies.

[1] As a result of this, as well as its various competitors gradually ceasing operations (including Cable Video Store and Request TV[8]), the Viewer's Choice name was gradually phased out from on-air reference towards the end of the decade, generally only being referred to as "pay-per-view" in promos, on-screen graphics and voiceovers; the name remained in on-screen copyright graphics and on listings services such as the Prevue Channel until late 1999 when it was eventually renamed "PPV1".

On January 1, 2000, the service changed its name and on-air look to In Demand; the logo was rendered as "iNDEMAND" with all of its letters except the beginning "I" capitalized.

In addition to Hollywood films and a limited selection of adult films, along with live and recorded concert programming, the service mainly distributes ring sports through pay-per-view, including the events of the WWE, All Elite Wrestling, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling and its forerunners, and independent circuits such as those with lucha libre.

Since this network's first inception, the first main Viewer's Choice/In Demand channel (usually labeled as 'IN1' or 'PPV1' since 2000), signs off weekday mornings from 8AM to 11AM (Eastern Time) to feed promotions of upcoming movies and events of the next month to its headend affiliates.

[21][22][23] On Friday, May 10, 2024, current In Demand CEO Dale Hopkins released an internal memo that In Demand was beginning to transition its operations back to Cox, Comcast and Charter internally by the end of 2025, and that In Demand as it is known now would wind down operations over the next eighteen months, along with its associated channels, with the departure of both Showtime and HBO from sports broadcasting at the end of 2023 and the wind-down of wireline pay-per-view services due to the rise of streaming video; most of its wrestling events are also available through streaming providers as part of a regular package.