Re: Is it just me who thinks 100% IP TV is scarey?
It's not an unreasonable leap of imagination.
Consider this: People are generally watching lot of different TV channels and increasingly just recording stuff to watch later.
If you combine those two activities with some kind of PVR (FreeView+, Sky+, V+, Tivo, etc.), most of the recorded programmes pre-selected for recording and probably even "series linked", then you only need to add internet connectivity to these boxes to allow you to just schedule downloads to take place in quiet times.
Add in a local server or some P2P type of service and it could be relatively efficient. You could even pre-download all of part of a series, but then instruct the box not to make it available for playback until a certain day+time.
Don't forget we're talking ~20 years into the future when (hopefully) internet connectivity would be much faster and more reliable.
Your only real outstanding problem is those things that are transmitted live (sports, news, etc), but in 20 years there may only be a fairly small number of people who watch these things live anyway.
One possibility for the news would be to download pre-recorded news items during the day and then have the set-up box queue them in on instruction from the central broadcaster.
Actually, thinking about it, we're on the road already; the BBC iPlayer desktop application can be instructed to download episodes of a series as they become available, which is currently a few hours after broadcast. It wouldn't take much of a change to allow the download to happen before broadcast and have the iPlayer "hide" the download until transmission time.
TBH, the biggest road-block to any of this happening is the content owners not the technology.