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Some movies and albums, we're told, even appear illegally on the Net before they make it to the theatres or stores.

One thing you don't hear quite so much about however, is the ready availability of material that's been screened free to air (FTA). I'm talking about episodes of drama and sitcom series that are easy to find and download from any number of places on the Net.

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There is a growing number of people who, rather than waiting for the latest series of a favourite programme to be screened here in NZ, simply jump online and download it through the Net.

Obviously this proves that there's a good market for making such material legally available online -- and Google seems to have spotted this.

Just last week the search engine giant announced that it's entering into agreements with various video content providers to sell this stuff to the great unwashed masses -- and that's a good thing.

In fact I strongly suspect that while PVRs and other such devices will change the way we watch TV, it's the integration of IP with TV that will really be the long-term winner.

We're talking about video on demand (VOD), a technology that has been log-touted but not really delivered. This is not surprising because traditional TV is a broadcast (one to many - OTM) technology, whereas true VOD is a one to one (OTO) technology.

Whereas OTM can deliver content to an effectively unlimited number of recipients at a fixed cost, OTO systems require a far greater investment of money and resources.

With traditional OTM TV broadcasting, it costs the broadcaster a fixed amount to deliver their content to the audience in a given area, regardless of whether there's just one TV set turned on or a million viewers huddled around the tube.

With OTO technologies such as VOD, every new viewing session costs the broadcaster money because it ties up more valuable bandwidth -- and this has been the killer when it comes to implementing commercial systems.

But now we have the internet right? The Net has huge capacity to deliver digital content at a very reasonable cost for both the sender and the recipient -- or does it?

In the rest of the world this is true -- but here in NZ, as we well know, we're hog-tied by Telecom's monopoly over the DSL network. You can't deliver much video content when you're limited in speed and have a paltry 1-10GB data cap can you?

For this reason, I doubt that we'll see Google's new video store doing brisk business in this part of the world - but that probably won't make Telecom cry at all.

Many years ago, Telecom was actually building an IP-based VOD system and it even got so far as to install service to several Auckland suburbs. Unfortunately they were just too early and various commercial and perhaps technical issues meant that it never became a viable enterprise.

Of course things have changed and I suspect that Telecom knows full well exactly how valuable an IP-based VOD service will soon become. By maintaining a strangle-hold on their DSL network, Telecom knows that they have the ability to become a 21st-century broadcaster quite capable of going head-to-head with TVNZ, CanWest and Sky.

Telecom knows full well that, although the Net is popular, there's a *lot* more money to be made out of tapping into the much larger market of couch-potatoes who, every night, plant themselves in front of the box for several hours.

Theresa and co know full well that the market for dial-up tolls is about to collapse into virtual oblivion (can you say VOIP?) and the future lies with IP-based broadband services.

Will this fact, combined with Telecom's monopoly mean that we are doomed to third-world status in the 21st century?

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