Cable television companies are in a unique position to get broadband Britain moving. They are the only organisations to own truly high bandwidth lines into millions of homes, and the only ones who stand a chance of persuading us to pay for more than just basic television.
They should be utterly dominant, but BT is beating them hands down at the broadband game while, in television, Sky's dominance is unchallenged.
Cable continues to win the 'most promising candidate' accolades year after year, but cannot seem to break through. Could 2003 be its year?
Around a month ago, I reported from a conference about the future of broadcasting. It was a glamorous do, with TV luvvies, strategists and government policy-makers worrying about big issues such as creativity, quality and culture. Looking back, it was a pretty cosy event: a meeting of concerned media professionals against generally nasty things. Appropriately, it was organised by the Guardian.
I have just spent two days at another media conference. This one was organised by the Financial Times, and if the Guardian conference was from Venus, the FT's was from Mars.
The topics under discussion were no less interesting or important, but they were much more scary. The broadcasting world described at this conference was a brutal one, characterised by a collapsing audience share, an unending advertising slump, attrition from competing platforms and, worst of all, an increasingly hostile and uninterested audience. Now, things are all about survival.
Television is still a big business: there are well over 300 channels on cable and satellite in the UK, but the economics are terrifying. How these channels split the dwindling advertising pot and conjure up viable businesses from audiences often too small to measure (an astonishing 160 UK channels register an audience of zero in the industry's official numbers) was exercising the minds of the executives present.
At the Guardian conference, the Channel 4 chief executive, Mark Thompson, quoted Matthew Arnold and traded classical allusions with his head of programmes. However, at the more recent event, classical references were thin on the gound. Hardly a BBC face was in the crowd, and the only terrestrial television heavyweight booked to speak, Carlton's CEO Michael Green, pulled out at the last minute.
The language was direct, and the concerns were not lofty. The CEO of Lifetime, a US women's channel, advocated turning channels into brands and marketing them appropriately. Among the benefits of this approach, he said, is that a strong brand will "help to smooth over the weaker programming in your portfolio".
Another speaker, the owner of half a dozen of those zero audience channels, said that hard negotiating is necessary in order to get programmes for a niche channel at low prices. Pile it high and sell it cheap.
The tough climate may not advance content quality: the only mention of programme quality in the whole conference came from an investment banker, not a programme-maker. However, it is pushing innovation along. Almost everyone talked about new revenue sources, with much fuss made about income from premium rate phone lines and SMS: 110 million phone votes were taken for the US version of Pop Idol alone.
The CEO of Fremantle Television, Tony Cohen, showed off a phenomenally successful line of merchandise derived from Rainbow, a childrens' show that has been off the air for 10 years, as well as a line of Pop Idol Karaoke machines. The herd instinct is at work, too: there are now 49 home shopping channels in the UK. How many stain removers and exercise bikes can the nation accommodate?
So the climate for the TV industry is tough and getting tougher. The lights go out at a niche cable channel about once a month, audiences for even the biggest terrestrial shows are still falling, and an advertising recovery is probably two years away.
Nevertheless, the cable TV operators, Telewest and NTL, really should be striding the emerging media landscape with confidence. Only they can offer the "triple play" of digital television, a telephone line and broadband internet access all in one. Telewest, the number two cable firm, estimates that it could provide 30 megabits of data per second to every home it reaches: 60 times BT's basic broadband offering.
Households that take all three services are enormously profitable for cable firms, spending many times what an ordinary multi-channel home spends.
However, the firms are still struggling. Epic debts built up over decades of digging trenches and laying cable, disastrous ventures into sports and entertainment content during the boom, and time-consuming restructuring forced by creditors and investors, dog the industry.
It may, on paper, be the best qualified to build broadband Britain, but unless lingering problems of fragmentation (the two big firms must get on and merge), legendarily bad customer service and an unshakeably dowdy image can be resolved soon, cable is destined to lose the race.
