What A Difference A Day Makes

OK, a day may be understating it, but the speed of development in the Internet TV sector is accelerating.

We've seen the widgetmeisters of Apple, Google, Samsung and Canvas, oops, sorry, YouView all strutting their stuff (if not their wares) and the reinvented Boxee box, now removed from the shackles of Nvidia, reborn as an Intel device that will imminently be in the shops, all in a few weeks.

Frankly, I've sat back in disbelief as a world I fully assumed would manifest itself in 2004 or 2005 finally came to pass.

But all of this technology presuppose that some other basic problems have been solved. Problems like rights, and cost effective content provision.

Once upon a time, just after the end of the Yugoslav civil war, I ran a sizeable company in Croatia. On one of my visits I took a drive down from our base in Zagreb down to the coast, only to find that the wonderful, almost empty motorway suddenly ended in mid air above a roundabout some thirty miles from our destination.

I'm getting a sense of deja vu, asking myself, what has changed. New boxes with iPlayer and YouTube, and er... A web browser and keyboards. Vive la difference...

Perhaps today isn't so different from yesterday after all.