Television proprietors around the world are worried.

Back in March, I reported that “major audience disintegration for free-to-air TV could occur within a handful of years.”

Now new media experts are confirming that Internet TV will very soon break the oligopoly enjoyed by most of the world’s fiercely protective free-to-air networks by giving anyone the chance to broadcast to their lucrative audiences.

In an article in today’s Age newspaper, Akihiro Utada, one of Japan’s foremost internet analysts and the author of several books on digital culture, has written that “when it becomes standard for TVs to be connected to broadband services and for viewers to watch on-demand movies and programs [through the internet], it is inevitable for terrestrial TV stations offering real-time broadcasting to lose their importance.”

“The day will come when we look back at this age as a period when Japanese TV stations were enormously privileged due to the limited functions of TV sets.”

Its a wonderful time to be a student of VCE Unit 1, Outcome 3 – New Media Technologies – witnessing the end of FTA TV – watching the huge changes in the production and consumption of media – as the full implications of the invention of the internet in the 1990’s continue to work their devastating way across the old media landscape – once dominated by the newspaper, radio and tv networks which lived off the advertising revenues of largely captive national audiences.