Whilst all the focus is on the demise of newspapers (and I’ll deal with this in a separate post) no-one is talking about free-to-air and yet arguably they are in a worse situation than their paper cousins.

The simple fact is that everyone who wants a tv has got one – the only way the FTA market can increase is if the population increases (which might make for an interesting change of tact on immigration on Today Tonight and A Current Affair). There’s no growth left.

The fracturing of audiences is well known with the competing interests such as the internet (well there’s so many interesting blogs out there, isn’t there?) putting huge pressure on the FTA companies. Digital TV is only exasperating the situation spreading the same number of viewers across 3 times as many channels with all those increases in programming costs.

This truly is a dog eat dog situation. One channel can only grow at the expense of another and this seems, to me at least, a rather bleak outlook with dire consequences for viewers as companies look for the cheapest form of TV to fill their burgenoning spots.

And, of course, it could all get worse. Australian TV companies are basically importers producing very little of their own content. If the overseas producers decide to cut out the middle man and deliver their product straight to consumers’ homes via the web then just what are they going to do?

James Packer’s virtual move out of TV may have been a sign that he sees the writing on the wall for traditional FTA TV (although ironically what is catastrophic for the commercial channels is the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the publicy funded ABC and SBS).

The commercials need to start positioning themselves now as aggregators of content, doing what they are good at, programming, but on a massive scale – using their experience to scour the vast sea of content to make taking part in this brave new world as simple as a few clicks on the remote.

It’s been really successful, especially since I combined it with Nourish, an RSS-to-email service. It has arond a dozen authors and is regularly viewed by a vast majority of the staff.

Today I got a call from one of the authors : a message was coming up telling her that Squarespace no longer supports IE6 (yes, the corporate browser is still IE6) and so basically all my authors are now locked out the system.

I know that IE6 is over 7 years old and yes, there was a message on the control panel for a while saying that the interface is being upgraded and support for IE6 was going to be dropped but I thought it would only look a little odd, not that it wouldn’t let my authors in.

Why, I wonder now, did Squarespace not offer me the choice to stay on ver 4 of their software? I know that they are a service and it easier for them to upgrade everyone but hey, I am the customer here! So, with no upgrade to the SOE on the hroizon, now I seem to have little alternative but to look for a new provider and take my custom elsewhere.

Which is plain annoying as I was very happy with Squarespace and so were my customers.

Thing is, newspapers are so useful. Read them on the train, on the toilet, at the breakfast table. Dip in or take your time, no problem. Roll them up and put them in your pocket your briefcase, or in the case of the Tour de France Riders, up your shirt.

TV’s different. Watching TV on a small screen sucks and flies in the face of our ever increasing desire for ever increasing TV screen sizes. (Did you know, that soon our TVs will consume more power than it takes to heat and cool our homes?.) No matter how hard Telstra tells us, you are not going to find 30 excited members of the public gathering around a single mobile phone even if it is showing Olympic highlights.

So, we much prefer watching TV on a, well TV, a big one at that. Which means that we are stationary and we are in the lounge room. And that means the picture could be coming via the arial, the cable or the media pc. We don’t really care. And that’s a problem for TV.

I’ve used the ABC’s iView and even on my ADSL , it’s really not that bad. If the program choice increases or the commerical channels get there collective backsides in gear, then I’ll start looking at ADSL2. Of course, should the BBC or Hulu open its programming up to the international market then I may as well take away the aeriel because, Kerrianne or no Kerrianne, my TV is coming down the phone line. When I want it.

And that’s a problem for TV.

Seems like newspapers will be around long enough to attend at least one mainstream media funeral.