VIEWER’S CHOICE: Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page at an electronics show in Las Vegas.

By now, everybody knows that anything audio is eventually followed by something video. Radio first, then TV. Audio tape, then videotape. CD, then DVD. Music iPod, then video iPod.

And then, of course, there’s Apple’s iTunes Music Store. The day it began selling videos too was the first time that cowering TV executives ever climbed down off of their kitchen tables and allowed somebody to use “TV show” and “Internet” in the same sentence. It was a small, timid test ? only five TV series from one network at first, only in the US, at low resolution and with copy protection ? but it was a spectacular success. TV fans bought about eight million videos in the first three months of the service.

You don’t sell that much of anything without attracting the attention of your rivals. At the recently-held Consumer Electronics Show, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and Google all announced new variations on the “download for a fee TV show” formula. Only one of those ventures has already opened for business: Google Video (http://video.google.com).

Google’s video store is a far less controlled experiment than Apple’s. In fact, Google doesn’t even call it a video store; it prefers “the first open video marketplace”. Its big, Google-esque, democratic idea is that anyone, from the biggest TV network to the most talent-free camera-phone owner, is allowed to post videos for all the world to see ? and to buy.

If it sounds a bit chaotic, you’re right; Google Video’s hallmark is its wild inconsistency. On iTunes, you always know what the price will be: $2 an episode. Every show is downloadable and transferable to an iPod. And you know the quality you’re going to get: great colour and clarity, professional production values, no ads.

At Google’s video emporium, on the other hand, anything goes. Some videos are copy-protected, others not. Some can be downloaded, others viewed only online. The resolution and production quality vary widely.

Some have ads. Some offer a three-minute preview, others only 10 seconds. Some videos are free, some cost money. (The price can be anything; although the sell-your-own-video feature won’t go live for a couple of weeks. Google keeps 30 per cent.)

This sort of anarchy isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example, it’s empowering to think that you can post home movies of your baby or sophomoric Star Wars spoofs right alongside episodes of CBS shows and basketball reruns from the NBA.

But it’s not necessarily a good thing, either. With inconsistency comes disappointment and frustration. Why is it that you can download a Charlie Rose talk show to have and to hold forever, but a CSI episode self-destructs after 24 hours?

The offerings break down into three categories. First, there’s the commercial-TV stuff. CBS offers a strange assortment of 12 past and present series, including Survivor: Guatemala (15 episodes), Star Trek: Voyager (five), MacGyver (three) and I Love Lucy (15). The NBA makes all its games available online 24 hours after they are played, for $4 each. Sony BMG offers 52 music videos for $2 each. (At the moment, a US credit card is required to buy videos.)

The second category is what you might call pseudo-commercial: third-tier, no-name, late-night, channel 900 stuff. You can buy movies like Somewhere in Indiana; how-to videos like Rocki's Prenatal Yoga: Labor Preparation 2; 38-minute movies, like Adrenaline Rush, that were originally shown in Imax theatres; and concert videos like Bacon Brothers: Live (all $15 each).

The final category is the user-submitted material. A majority of it is unwatchable trash: home movies, homemade animations and that old Internet standby, the “making fun-of incompetent dancers” video.