In use, the Freeview side of the box is par for the course. Its pictures look much like any other Freeview box and recordings are transparent to the original source. When it comes to the quality of VOD material, playback is smooth and moderately detailed.

Although it feels as if the VOD selections are unspooling from the hard drive, they are in fact streaming from a BT server. Standard FF/REW/pause control is possible. Smoothness depends on your broadband speed. BT recommends a minimum of 2Mb.

Interestingly, the box can decode VC1, MPEG-4, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 DVB SD video, MPEG-4 AVC and MPEG-2 HD, and MPEG-1 layer 2, AAC and Dolby Digital audio. This gives it huge future-proofing potential as and when appropriate firmware is released. 128Mbytes of RAM is available to system resources, while a 300MHz processor drives the EPG.

Poor and expensive

As for the value of BT's VOD service, that's yet to be determined. Currently, the selection of programming is poor and expensive. Charging 29p for a three-minute music video strikes me as way too much.

And I'm not alone in feeling cool to Pay-Per-View VOD. According to the influential Forrester Research group, downloading pay content is unlikely to become a mainstream pursuit, which could be bad news for BT's gameplan.

Instead it suggests that in the near future broadcasters and studios will move to streaming technology funded by advertising. That business model (as advocated by ITV.com) is where the lucrative ad market of tomorrow will migrate and where most money will be made.

So has our telecoms giant come to the market half-cocked or is BT Vision indeed an evolutionary product? A bit of both, actually.

While I have reservations about the value of the VOD content - there should be more free stuff - and have courted madness through its erratic behaviour, I don't feel inclined to write the BT Vision box off.

BT has a chance to fix its bugs and improve functionality via firmware updates. If it can get it working as advertised, this would be a very cool product indeed.