As we pointed out in a recent column: "In the more leisurely economies of the past, the exchange that took
place between the broadcaster and the viewer was relatively benign. The network imposed what was essentially a tax on time, in which the viewer paid for his entertainment with those mindless minutes spent watching
commercials.

"Unfortunately, today's economy has completely altered the exchange rate. It isn't just that the amount of entertainment that these days can be squeezed in between the commercial breaks seems to have shrunk
dramatically. There's also the opportunity cost: adjusting one's life to suit the network schedules requires a considerable sacrifice."

The advertising industry has already begun to wake up. Rocketboom, for instance, is now making $US85,000 a week from its advertisers.

All these developments underline just how pathetic the Packer empire's response - suing the tiny EPG company IceTV - is. They've been treating their audience with contempt for far too long, and now they're going to pay for it. As we pointed out recently, we can't remember when we last watched anything on Nine.

In the past couple of weeks, we've seen more of the tectonic plates slipping. The US network CBS has joined NBC and the ABC selling their shows on the iTunes Music Store. Essentially this is video on demand on training wheels. The shows are available in the US at $1.99 a throw, but the future is ad-supported downloads - ironically, probably using BitTorrent.

Free to air TV is just going to have to learn to live with a diminished share of the audience - although this will take a lot longer in Australia, due to the fact that our Government has allowed Telstra to drip-feed the nation with bandwidth. Terry Heaton suggests it's a critical time for local media, which is struggling to come up with solutions. Hiis point is this: "The foundational understanding that broadcasters MUST get their arms around is this: Revenue isn't the problem; audience is the problem. Fix the problem." Australian TV faces the same problem. It has alienated its audiences by stuffing as many ads as possible into the programming, cheating them by recycling shows they've already seen without notice, and ignoring their published schedules. To say nothing of constantly showing them junk. Judging from their response to the brewing crisis, they seem utterly clueless as to what might be done to win back viewers.

By the way. The latest edition of PC User magazine includes an article on how to convert video to PDA format. Not that we believe too many people are going to be watching video on handhelds. Not regularly, anyway.

And Bleeding Edge's ADSL service got shaped last month, because we were downloading too many shows from the BBC.