Glossing over the slight contradiction that TV over the Internet is, necessarily, digital, and the equally all-encompassing vagueness of "internet-based", it seems to me that far from being the future of TV, digital broadcasting is just an interesting stepping stone, and by the time we get to switchover, the Next Big Thing will already be here. Digital radio, meanwhile, has so little benefit over FM that I've never really seen the point (interestingly, the Grauniad agrees with me on that one, too) and is heading to the internet already - think Spotify and last.fm.

At the time, there was a lot of hype over Joost, but when I tried it, it was appalling - pop-up adverts in the middle of your TV screen anyone? The currently US-only Hulu seems to be more respected, but I think something more fundamental has yet to happen, and that is the emergence of a technology, not a service. Ideally, you won't be using a different player interface depending who's hosting the video, you'll just "tune in" with whatever screen you have to hand. And you won't tune in to a "channel", either.

The trend seems clear: from a handful of channels a few years ago, to dozens or even hundreds of channels, which have a tenuous individual identity inside larger brands. Do people really notice if something's on ITV3 rather than ITV2, as long as they can find it in the listings? And then you have the "+1" channels ("Dave" apparently got its name to avoid launching "UKTV G2 +1"), hidden "interactive" channels (like when the BBC show several tennis matches at once), mixed content "HD" channels, and finally the growing range of "video on demand" services - the iPlayer, itvPlayer, etc.

So who needs channels? Why not just have an entire internet full of different TV programs, and watch what you like, when you like?

TV channels do still provide a few services which would need fulfilling in a fully "opened up" Internet TV scenario. Most obviously, they provide the contractual conduit that gets money from advertisers, or subscribers, to the people that actually make the content; and the technical conduit that gets the content onto people's screens. Someone will always have to have that "broadcaster" role, but they won't be limited by anything as old-fashioned as "airtime".

But channels also provide a kind of recommendation service - the fact that something's showing on a particular channel tells the would-be viewer something about it. With on-demand technology, I see this as the job of aggregators - services who put together "playlists" of recommendations. maybe you just browse the listings and see a review of a new show, by a reviewer you trust. Or maybe you want to sit on your sofa vegging out to cheesy American sitcoms, so you "tune in" to the feed from cheesy-american-sitcoms.tv. And if something comes on you don't want, just press "skip"...

Not everything's "on demand" of course - there's still value in that "did you see the latest episode last night" buzz, and there's plenty of scope for live TV, and even interactive TV. But the news is already a channel, not a programme, and even if they don't run for 24-hours a day, there's no reason The X-Factor and Coronation Street can't stand on their own, too. With a prominent "broadcast by ITV" logo, obviously.

Obviously, there are plenty of problems to be worked out - not just technical, but legal and financial: who pays who what for the rights to these programmes? do you insist on "broadcasters" using geographic restrictions, or do you just charge for a global licence? for that matter, what rights do end-users get, and how do they pay for them? But given that I live in a Freeview-less area, I'm hopeful that by the time we lose the analogue signal, we just won't care, because the cutting edge will have moved on...

Now, part of this is because the Tour de France is the only professional cycling race that's generally covered on "mainstream" TV - I've never had the "luxury" of Eurosport. A few years ago, even that was in doubt, with Channel 4 suddenly dumping the rights, and ITV rather half-heartedly taking them over. Which brings me to this year's "good news, bad news" story.

• Good News: ITV4 has a daily 1-hour highlights programme. Which frankly is as much as I can take every day for 3 weeks. And they have the same great team I've been watching for over 15 years, including commentators Paul Sherwen and Phil Liggett, who I recently discovered simultaneously cover it for the US channel Versus, dropping out of conversation to introduce completely different advert breaks and special features!
• Bad News: I live in Eastbourne. For those that don't know, this means a digital switchover date of 2012, and only 4 (yes, that's 4, folks!) channels without a satellite dish until then.
• Good News: ITV4 is streamed live online. And I even have a set-up that allows me to watch that on my TV!
• Bad News: It's on too early. The highlights programme is on every night at 19:00; the earliest I get home from work is 19:15.
• Good News: It's also available via the ITV Player on-demand service!
• Bad News: The ITV Player is a heap of junk.
• The End.

OK, I'll justify that statement a bit:

1. The 1st thing I was greeted with when I went to the site was a "pop-over" asking if I'd like to take a survey about the Coronation Street website. I checked; they really were asking everyone who clicked "ITV Player" what they thought of their Corrie microsite. Oops.
2. The 2nd thing I was greeted with was a Flash advert pop-over that didn't have a background or bounding box, and appeared partly in front of and partly behind the survey box.
3. The navigation uses the most pointlessly non-standard controls I've ever seen, including a bizarre Flash-driven combo-box that takes 2 seconds to appear, and 2 microseconds to get bored of you and close while you're scrolling through it. If you do manage to click on a programme title, you have to click a "Go" button next to it; because, you know, you might want to do something else; like run away from this monstrosity!
4. Once you have found the programme you want, the Silverlight-based video player is not the best I've ever seen. To be fair, it's a lot better than it was - it now has a proper seek bar, which marks advert breaks but only makes you watch one at a time, rather than the "skip to start of next advert break" the previous version featured. Oh, and it actually works in Firefox this time. But whose bright idea was the tiny volume control? And what is the "Unpin Controls" button supposed to do?
5. Every now and then, one of the video files seems to go missing. Some poor shift-worker mistypes a filename or something, I don't know. This would be kind of annoying if it meant that a programme was listed as available but wouldn't play, but ITV split their programmes at advert breaks. So you start watching a 1-hour highlights programme, get to the "find out who won after the break", watch the advert break, and... Nothing.

   When this 1st happened to me, the service (then called "ITV Catch-up") was fairly new, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt - "teething problems" and all that. But it's still happening. It's reassuring to know that I'm not alone in my frustration either. The current player sits there repeatedly trying to load the video until you stop it or skip to a section that exists, so I've been leaving it running in case someone notices some weird anomalies on their access logs.

Ah well, I guess it's better than nothing. Most of the time.