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Tak­ing the long-term per­spec­tive, which is worse:

1. The news that North Korea has test-detonated a nuclear bomb, or

2. The real­i­sa­tion that, in the near future, peo­ple every­where will be watch­ing TV clips on their mobiles and annoy­ing the hell out of other peo­ple who are try­ing to get on with their lives?

If, like me, you think the answer is 2, then the news com­ing out of this week’s Las Vegas Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show (CES) won’t make you feel much bet­ter. The show appears obsessed with TV. Last year, yet again, it was HDTV; this year, it’s the many dif­fer­ent ways to get TV onto your mobile, not to men­tion IP-enabled TV sets.

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The choice for dig­i­tal music fans has got wider again with the announce­ment by new entrant Spi­ral­Frog that it will begin a free (ie ad-supported) music down­load ser­vice that will give users access to Vivendi’s Uni­ver­sal Music Group’s cat­a­logue (if you are in North Amer­ica that is). Uni­ver­sal is back­ing the new start-up and, as the world’s largest music com­pany, should be able to offer a rea­son­able selec­tion. And the magic word ‘free’ never hurts.

This is, of course, just the lat­est attempt to chal­lenge iTunes’ dom­i­nance in the (legal) down­load mar­ket. But for me, it kind of misses the point.

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