Scalable video is an attractive option for adapting the bandwidth consumption of streaming video to the available bandwidth. Fine-grained scalability can adapt most closely to the available bandwidth, but this comes at the cost of a higher overhead compared to more coarse- grained videos. In the context of VoD streaming, we have therefore explored whether a similar adaptation to the available bandwidth can be achieved by performing layer switching in coarse-grained scalable videos. In this approach, enhancement layers of a video stream are swit- ched on and off to achieve any desired longer term band- width. We have performed three user studies, two using mobile devices and one using an HDTV display, to eval- uate the idea. In several cases, the far-from-obvious con- clusion is that layer switching is a viable way of achieving bit-rate savings and fine-grained bit-rate adaptation even for rather short times between layer switches, but it does, however, depend on scaling dimensions, content and dis- play device.