As I type this I am watching Peter Hitchens' wonderfully hysterical attack on David Cameron in a small window on my PC. It was screened on Monday night, but I forgot to Sky Plus it. Earlier today, as I read the online New York Times, Wednesday night's Grand Designs was playing in the background. Later, without moving from my computer, I will catch up on the two episodes of Shameless I missed. All this, and much, much more besides, thanks to Channel 4's new on demand internet service (4oD) . Shameless - unlike the two other programs I have watched, which are free - will cost me a quid an episode, and in a way this comes as something of a relief. After all, someone has to pay for this stuff.
Since Sky Plus was launched a few years ago, advertisers have become aware that the vast majority of viewers are simply skipping through their ads. Now with 4oD, which simply requires a broadband connection and a small piece of software, there is no need even to fast-forward. Advertising, once the bread and butter of commercial television, is no longer even present. You might think, having endured one Ocean Finance advert too many, that this is a good thing. However, I am in two minds.
The only two broadcasters to have survived without advertising, which needless to say pays for the vast majority of commercial telly's content, are HBO (which does so profitably) and the BBC (which does so unprofitably). To pretend, as some television executives still do, that this isn't happening, or doesn't matter, is to live in cloud cuckoo land. Alan Sugar, writing about Sky Plus for the Guardian a while back (his company Amstrad produces the set-top boxes) predicted, with characteristically philistine enthusiasm, that all programs - dramas, comedies, even documentaries - would, in the very near future, be paid for by product placement. In such circumstances it is near impossible to believe that anyone would bother making anything serious ever again. Or at any rate it is hard to imagine anything looking serious ever again. Can you imagine, for instance, what Dispatches might look like if, as it attempted to disentangle the Iraq war, it also hoped to flog you Omega watches?
The advent of C4's new service makes such purgatorial intrusions even more likely, since unlike Sky Plus, 4oD requires no subscription charges. You simply sign up, and five minutes later you're watching what you want, when you want. This is surely the death of scheduling. On the upside, it will mean an end to chivvying, patronising garbage like the 9pm watershed. On the downside, it is easy to foresee a time when programme-makers adopt an all too cautionary policy, forever fretting that their content might be too adult and too easily available.
Finally, I am utterly mystified that it was C4, not the BBC, who was the first to offer up this service. The Beeb, sponsored to the hilt and answerable to no one, is in a perfect position to take advantage of broadband and the convergence of the personal computer with television. Wouldn't it be nice, if simply by entering our post codes and a password as proof of our license fee, we were able to trawl through their mammoth archives? I quite fancy a Dennis Potter play right now.
