As a user of BBC’s iPlayer since its very early beta, I’m quite encouraged by the big take up in the service recently – (See Hitwise Intelligence – Robin Goad – UK: BBC iPlayer traffic increases 14-fold in a month) – I don’t have a VCR and the DVD recorder died, as most seem to do, through lasers being just too darn sensitive to family life.

One big worry remains though as a user of the iPlayer and services like Channel 4’s “4 on demand” – bandwidth. The phone companies (and the government) got things wrong many years ago when they missed the opportunity to invest in rewiring the country before it got crucial. Now it is crucial and it’s pretty much too late. By the time our broadband speeds have caught up with the likes of Japan, our appetite for data download and upload will have already increased too much.