Media: A Moment with Marquis.

There is a more or less infallible law governing new developments in media. It states that while still small and insignificant, a new media development will be hyped with hysteria, fear and wild optimism in equal measure. Once it is large, established, successful and has utterly transformed the media scene, it will be taken for granted as if it had been around for 100 years. Whatever was all the fuss about?

Examples include the arrival of commercial TV, new technology in newspaper production and, of course, the internet, which made not just the media industry but the entire world lose its marbles for a three-year period before settling down to be the very obvious revolution it was always destined to be.

Another such development is the personal video recorder. Remember the doom-laden pieces about TiVo, the magic box that gives the viewer total control of their TV? Quite sane commentators pronounced that 30-second TV ads were dead and that the game was up for the agencies that made them.

So: much renting of garments and gnashing of teeth, followed by an unusual lull in which TiVo quietly withdrew from the UK market after deciding the British appeared to be to early adoption what the bow and arrow is to the laser-guided, tactical nuclear device, and therefore weren't yet ...