When I was young our television had three channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, and we watched in black and white.

I remember our first colour TV, partly because when it arrived and we turned it on BBC2 was showing a black and white film and I thought it was broken.

Now it seems that television itself is broken. ITV, Five and Channel Four are all in financial difficulty because they no longer earn enough from advertising, and some much-loved series like Heartbeat have been cancelled, not because they aren't popular but because they aren't popular enough.

Even the BBC is finding it hard to balance its desire to build large audiences with its mission to provide programmes that will inform and educate as well as entertain.

One of the biggest challenges facing broadcasters is that many of us no longer want to watch broadcast television, and we don't have to.

Sky+ users can simply tell their set top box which programmes they want to record off-air and watch them whenever they choose, skipping through the adverts, credits and boring bits.

Anyone with a broadband connection can watch a wide range of programmes on their computer screen. ITV, C4 and Five programmes are streamed over the internet, so you can watch them when you feel like it, and the BBC iPlayer has been very successful for both television and radio.

And if you're feeling adventurous you can plug your computer into a projector and use iPlayer or itv.com to show your favourite shows on the wall and making even the biggest flat-screen televisions look small.

Watching television over the internet is convenient for more and more people but it is hard for the programme-makers to make money out of it. Internet advertising sells for less and is a lot less effective than the thirty-second commercials that made Heinz Baked Beans, Daz washing powder and Nescafe essential consumer products, and so the funding available is less.

The same problem faces newspapers. We want to know what is happening in the world, but now that job ads are online newspapers have to increase their price, sending more and more of us to the internet where we can get lots of information for free.

This vicious circle seems likely to continue, perhaps to the point that even very popular programmes will be cancelled just because there isn't enough money in television to make them and nobody can make enough money online for quality dramas or long-running soaps.

Link:

ITV cuts costs

Last time I looked I had nearly fifteen thousand digital photographs stored on my computer, and I'm probably not alone.

I've been using digital cameras for well over a decade, and since it doesn't cost anything to take five digital photos where you'd only have taken one on film I've got more than I know what to do with.

One of the problems is figuring out what they all are, but now some help is available. Google's photo-sharing service Picasa and latest version of iPhoto, the photo management programme from Apple, can now try to recognise people in your photographs automatically.

You start by choosing a good picture of someone, like your partner or one of your children, and then you ask the programme to go and find similar photos. First time around it will identify lots of odd people or even, when I tried it, the odd chicken and cat, but you can go through the results telling it which ones are right.

And after a few goes it gets remarkably good at the job.

I've got my computer trained to spot pictures of my son and daugher, and it is proving really useful already.

But the surprising thing is when it spots someone in the background of a photo that you didn't expect to see them in.

This could prove embarrassing if photos uploaded to the internet are routinely scanned in this way.

Imagine trying to explain to your boss why you're in a tourist photo taken at a holiday resort in Spain when you were supposed to be at a conference in Huddersfield!