Tim Dean, Resident Thinker

They’re age-old questions: what drives human beings to do what we do? Are we driven by reason? Or is it desire and emotion that are running the show?

The logic is straight forward: some choice is good, therefore more choice is better. But there’s a point at which too much choice can be crippling. There are ample studies that have shown if we’re offered a constrained list of options, we make our choices more readily, with greater confidence and less buyers’ remorse. Give us a wider range of options and instead of being greeted with woots of joy, we pause, second guess and eventually buckle under uncertainty.

To get a grasp on how much television has changed in just a little over a decade, reflect on what your living room looked like around the turn of the millennium. Odds are the centre of attention was a chunky CRT, possibly a flat-CRT (although most were only flat in one dimension, like Sony’s flagship Trinitron). It was most likely hooked up to a VCR, and maybe even a DVD player. And if you did have a DVD player, you probably also owned a copy of The Matrix.