This sounds like a milestone worth celebrating, until you stop to think how long it's taken to get here. Digital terrestrial television officially commenced in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth on January 1, 2001. High definition broadcasting wasn't required until August 2003 and even then only Nine and Ten broadcast in 1080i - true high definition. The ABC recently upgraded to 720p but Seven and SBS broadcast so-called high definition in 576p. You can't even call that high definition in other countries.

A key problem early on was that the government insisted on broadcasting high definition in the DVB-T format, making Australia unique in the world. This meant set top boxes had to be made specifically for Australia. Of course no-one wanted to make boxes just for the tiny Australian market, so as a result digital set top boxes were expensive and almost impossible to get in the early days.

That first summer I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Thomson digital set top box and a big arse TV for review, perfect for watching the cricket on the Nine Network in glorious widescreen. Not many people can ring their boss on a Friday and say "I can't make it to work today because the cricket's on the telly and the Windies have put Australia in to bat". Even fewer people can do it and still have a job to return to on Monday.

One of the big promises of digital television was multi-angle broadcasting and Nine was testing it out during digital television's first baby steps. Nine's three extra channels were all broadcasting different views of the game. 'Nine Action 1' continually broadcast the view from a camera embedded in the middle stump, creatively known as "stump-cam". 'Nine Action 2' revealed the view from the grandstand, with the camera following the action around the ground. 'Nine Action 3' continually showed the computer generated scorecard. All of Nine's 'Action' channels had the audio from the main channel.

New, different, exciting. So far so good - so what went wrong? CONTINUED