This Reuters article on buying video over the Internet got us wondering about online video and cell phones. You can in fact buy or rent online videos today for your PC, although it's a bit of a kludge, with various services offering various levels of quality (such as Vongo, the iTunes Store, and Netflix). Video files take a long time to download, but the quality is surprisingly good. Netflix even lets you begin watching right away, instead of having to wait for the whole thing to download first.

However, you really can't do any of this with cell phones yet, aside from short clips, and the occasional live TV stream or full show. Would you want to? Having a box like the Apple TV would make it much easier to watch your downloaded content on your living room TV, instead of huddling in front of the family computer. But the natural progression is to then want the option to take it everywhere, including on your cell phone if you desired, despite the really small screen. It's a video file, so you should be able to do that. Unfortunately, the market has barely begun to sort that one out.

Study: Spending on video downloads to surge (Reuters via CNN)