Nothing kills a technology faster than a format war. HD-DVD, if you haven’t heard, is over before it has even begun. Nobody owns mini-disk players anymore. Consumer DAT is a joke. They’ve all gone the way of the Betamax video cassette: that is to say, there are some commercial uses for these devices, but they are hardly mainstream consumer technologies.

In digital radio, decisions about formats are being made – not by the consumer, but by the nation-state. America has different digital radio to Britain, for instance. The Japanese and the French have their own ideas.

In my home country of New Zealand, the debate is still raging as to which format to choose for DAB. But here in my adopted home of England, I enjoy digital radio services that allow me to hear some programming that I would otherwise not be able to hear. Not because I can’t get those programmes without a DAB radio – I listen to 6Music online, actually – but because the only reason those programmes exist is because there was a platform for them to exist on.

My favourite music radio station is – in a sense – just a mechanism to encourage people to migrate to a digital platform. And yet, that’s not the digital platform on which I listen to that station. I suspect I’m not alone in that.

Of course, HD Radio is a non-starter as far as encouraging new and exciting programming is concerned. The same frequencies are used by the same incumbents, and the same fare is dished up through slightly more expensive and shinier-sounding technologies.

That same Phil Collins track will sound slightly closer to the sound of a CD of Phil Collins than to a terrestrial broadcast of that CD – but it’ll still, sadly, be Phil Collins. After the break… Dire Straits.

But these – and even, I suspect, satellite radio – feel like an interim technology. Because nothing breaks a format war faster than a universal enabling technology. Say… like the internet.

Imagine if you could pick up the internet at high quality bitrates on portable, personal devices without connecting via modems, cables and dial-up infrastructures.

Ubiquitous wi-fi you say? Just around the corner? Portable wi-fi devices capable of tuning into any streaming service without reference to the geography of that signal’s point of origin?

Is it, in fact, possible that New Zealand – being the last developed country on the face of the planet to even formulate coherent digital radio policy – might have been right to drag its feet over a format decision for DAB and leapfrog over these interim technologies altogether?

Oh no… wait. Now they’re spending money on infrastructure. When it comes to broadcasting, it’s never too late to make a mistake.