All I need is an excuse. I would buy an iPod Video today if the iTunes Music Store began offering the same programs that it does in the US, giving those lucky colonials the chance to take Battlestar Galactica and Monk episodes on the train. Sure, you can buy video players over here – the Archos range is indeed lovely – but hardware is nothing without content, and there’s bugger all of that available right now. From iTunes, you can get some music videos and ancient Pixar shorts: our money is not even good enough to stock up on episodes of The Brady Bunch from Google Video.

Okay, so it’s not all bad.

It’s odd that of all the myriad entertainment providers, Sky is the first notable name to get into movies on-demand – and to do it for free. The service is called SkyByBroadband, I’ve wasted much of the month with it, and while it’s a curate’s egg of a launch if ever there was one, it’s a surprisingly good start for Video on Demand. All you need is a broadband connection and a subscription to either Sky Sports or Sky Movies.

Being on the Movies side of the line, I kicked off testing with a copy of Muppet Treasure Island, for no other reason than because it seemed ironic to legally download a movie about pirates. It was as easy as clicking the button marked ‘Download’, and, a couple of hours later, opening the WMV file in Media Player.

Sports downloads vary in length and availability, but any movies you download remain yours to play for 30 days, unless otherwise stated, after which the movie file becomes as useless as a Uwe Boll anecdote in an Oscar acceptance speech.

Assuming that the film is still available, you can download another copy and get another month’s worth of viewing, and another, and another, until it leaves the system. At the time of writing, everyone had 247 days to download The Day After Tomorrow, 177 for The Girl Next Door and 239 for Hellboy – although hopefully the plan is to keep adding films rather than swapping them out. Otherwise we’ll be stuck waiting the best part of a year to get shot of such films as Hudson Hawk, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, White Chicks and Hudson Hawk, a piece of cinematic dribble so bad that it demands two separate mentions. No, really. Any film with such painful product placement that “Will you play Nintendo with me?” can be used by the protagonist as a successful pick-up line deserves much, much worse than a place in the service’s opening line-up.

Aside from Bruce Willis comedies, the only hitch is that – shock, and indeed horror – the DRM makes Draco look like a Care Bear Cousin. It’s based on Windows Media, and makes no concessions for the fact that many houses have more than one computer. Not only do the movie licences insist that you play the movie on the machine you download it on, the SkyByBroadband software itself throws a hissy fit if it even suspects you may be running it on a different machine. That said, the nice Customer Services lady reset my details in about five seconds, with no arguments, after I had problems installing it.

In this instance, the time-bombing doesn’t bother me. It’s not like DRM on a paid-for file, which strips away your rights to use your purchase on the grounds that you might conceivably do something naughty. This is simply timing out a rental download. Fair enough, especially since it’s free. However, the strapped-down nature of the protection is a real pain. If a file has to be tied to a particular piece of hardware, I would much prefer to be able to drop it straight to a portable device instead of having to watch any downloads from the discomfort of an office chair – especially with a comfy sofa and a big TV sitting just a couple of meters under my feet.

Still, movies are just part of the picture. Television is where the real money is going to be, courtesy of episodic payments (especially in the US, with at least 22 episodes in most seasons). In terms of regions, and in terms of technology, the markets need to open up – and for good. Especially with the Internet on hand, anyone who desperately wants to know – say – what’s in the hatch in Lost is as many clicks away from finding out via the latest BitTorrent site as they are on the iTunes Music Store. The only difference is that iTunes kicks you out for coming from the wrong country, while BitTorrent recruits you into the distribution network. If there’s a benefit to this for anyone with their fingers in the money-pie, I’m at a loss to see it. But like I say, I’ve got a video iPod in my shopping basket if the situation changes.