I've had a hair-pulling time with TVNZ's new video ondemand service, which offers trailers, full-length 'catch' up episodes of local shows, plus limited archive footage. 'Catch-up' episodes of current shows are DRM protected, and can be saved (for $2 a half hour) to your PC then viewed via Windows Media Player. Older programmes are in unprotected Flash a la YouTube et al. On our broadband connection here at PC World Towers in Auckland's CBD, I found the short streaming clips stuttery, and I just couldn't get a half hour show to download without IE crashing soon after TVNZ's download manager appears. And once things do get rolling, a half hour episode is a big whacking download (close to half a gig), so if you're on a capped internet plan things could get mighty expensive mighty quick.

A number of the F1ers have had a better experience, and are pretty happy overall.

And good on TVNZ for giving it a go. But most of its viewers will need better broadband (or get offered better compression) before it takes off beyond a tiny niche. Currently, the sort of people who're comfortable downloading 500MB of video already know where to get a much bigger selection .... and for nix ...