Perhaps. But I think there is still a market for providing informative information, that is a site that can find the information wanted. Lots of sites make a good effort for free, but business critical information for example could be provided by a company for a price. This would be personalised search essentially, something that might be payable through micropayments.

That said I do agree with the general points, I don’t need to subscribe to read The Guardian, so I don’t pay for the paper.

Not personally sure that advertising is sufficient however. Everyone is advertising – who’s selling and are they really selling enough. My opinion says that advertising is badly done at the moment – Universities pour out people with degrees in the stuff but there’s no innovation there. Targetted advertising has to be done right – Phorm, Google, etc have all been on the recieving end when the consumer complains…

The problem for television is the vast array of content and the limited number of free to air stations (in .au at least) has led to an incredible amount of inflexibility. You can only air so many shows in a 24hr period. Even paytv suffers by forcing needless “packaged” stations that most will never watch. I cancelled my subscription because of that. When people don’t get to watch the things they want they will go elsewhere. Savy users go to the internet.

I still think television can be relevant, just as radio still is to a certain extent. Television has “ease of use” in its favor after all. The question is what can it do to answer the growing platform shift?