Food, clothing, shelter....and television.

These seem to be the basic necessities for life, at least in those regions of the World with electricity supply. Studies have shown that homes seem to be happier when there is a telly in the corner of the living room.

Here in the UK there are so many ways to watch the telly that we should be a very happy nation indeed. But the average punter has struggled to follow the Digital Switchover, work out the HD classification of flat panel TVs, and is mystified by new transmission methods like Cable and IPTV.

Since the early 1980s when UK transmission was dominated by 3 TV stations, the choice of TV channels has exploded.

Back then choice was perhaps more limited, but entertaining content was assured for your £46 license fee – following the BBC’s principles of good taste and common decency, and a mantra of educating and informing the public.

Setting aside endless reruns of Dad’s Army and ignoring chewing-gum-television categories of Reality/Daytime Chat/HomeMakeover, most worthwhile original content is still on the Beeb. When Roger Waters of Pink Floyd wrote of “13 channels of shit of the TV to choose from” (The Wall,  1979) he could scarcely have imagined the true horror of a 48+ TV channel UK featuring the unmissable lineup of National Lottery Extra and BidUp TV.

Nearly 30 years later, for many choice of TV content is no more varied, we all have to fiddle with strange set top boxes and multiple remote controls, and now have to pay to watch live football. Not all progress then.

Clearly the next step in our audiovisual evolution is to be able to conveniently watch our favourite programs where and when we want, with a minimum of fuss. For most consumers this means “plug and play” compatibility of components and 1 remote control for everything.

News Corporation’s SKY has delivered on these requirements and succeeded in the UK. It has annexed popular content like Premier League football, and simplified the viewing experience for the public with set-top boxes that work well.

This has been achieved at considerable cost to the public. At the start of 2009, only half of British households were willing to put up with plain old Freeview. The rest are paying from £240 per year for this convenience and content – and the vast majority of them have a satellite dish on the wall, discounting a handful of Cable and BT Vision subscribers.

And it doesn’t stop there. News Corporation will gladly take another £120 for another SKY tuner for the kitchen/spare room/antisocial teenagers bedroom. SKY+, their take on the Personal Video recorder, has also proved popular with around 50% of SKY’s subscribers, so they don’t miss last night Big Brother, and can skip past the adverts. All these subscriptions add up to an eye-watering £452 average revenue per unit according to SKYs last quarterly results.

Such Multiroom and Personal Video Recording (PVR) technology is also available to viewers of free “council telly”. But although UK sales of Freeview PVRs reached 1 million earlier this year, they are still dwarfed by the subscribers to SKY+. 

For the techno-literate, willing to spend time fitting together loosely compatible fast home networks, streaming media devices, and HD tellies, anything is possible. Such technophiles are inspired by the dream of being able to view and listen to high quality, digital High-Definition content either broadcast or on-demand, from any source, on any device.

However, reality falls short of this dream, as it relies on infrastructure not present in the home – unless you happen to live in a building flooded with Cat6 ethernet cable, and live in FibreCity Dundee.

The problem of a home network to distribute digital content to all screens and speakers in the house has never been satisfactorily or economically resolved.

Many homes now own a wireless broadband router (often called a ADSL or Cable modem) which can project a private wireless network around the house. Sadly, even in latest Wireless-N guise, this medium struggles to reach the bandwidth and reliability required to reach perfection for the feature-length HD movie – which is no good if you have just shelled out £600 for the new 42” flatscreen telly. Even when it works, many struggle with the practicalities of choosing and securing the correct wireless network in WiFi congested suburbia. And there is always the nagging concern that it may quietly be slow-cooking our children’s brains.

There are encouraging signs that Powerline Ethernet could be the simple solution that is taken up in the home. It’s more reliable than wireless, potentially simpler to setup, and with a bandwidth to support Full HD streaming. BT seem to think this is the answer, having embraced the solution for their self-fit BT Vision/BT Home hub solution.

Maybe the antisocial teenager in front of his bedroom TV has the answer. He has been downloading early release movies in HD quality to his XBOX 360 for several months now, and soon will be able to access content from SKY and BT Vision sources.  The cognoscenti choose a Windows 7 Media Center PC, which is a sinple £250 solution yielding a networked home hub device to manage all video, audio and photo content, as well as acting as a Freeview/Freesat PVR.

All this innovation has passed some UK viewers by. Its estimated that a full 20% of UK TV owners are still watching Analogue TV transmissions. These people get a nasty shock when in 2012 the final areas of the UK face the big Digital Switch.

Despite these challenges, we remain optimistic that we can all watch Scotland on Freeview High Definition glory as they compete in the 2010 World Cup Finals in South Africa.

But don’t hold your breath.