But technology cannot be stabilised for all time. On the contrary, new payment structures and transmission arrangements are being conceived every few months. Such is the degree of flux at present that no one can give reliable long-term forecasts of the relative importance of different transmission and payment mechanisms. BSkyB, ITV and every other shareholder-owned media organisation in Britain face intense competition not only from other such organisations with a known commitment to a particular technology, but also from new organisations with distinctive and unexpected technologies. Transmission by means of cable has been available for a long time. But the most exciting of the new technologies is internet broadcasting and the most menacing of the new competitors are the telephone companies which own the transmission capability (the copper wires or mobile frequencies). 

Telephone companies have a huge, in-built advantage with internet broadcasting. Precisely because they own the equipment that transmits internet material, including streamed programming, they know the identities of the people and companies who benefit from that equipment. It is a relatively simple matter for them to add TV programming to the telephone package and to charge for the extra services. British Telecom's acquisition of rights to broadcast football matches to its broadband customers is as direct a challenge to BSkyB as could be imagined. Not that BSkyB has been surprised by BT's invasion of its turf, which in this case is a particularly apt word. For some years it has wanted to persuade its TV subscription customers to choose BSkyB for telephone services as well. Both BSkyB and BT are seeking to market not just broadcasting options, but the so-called "triple play" of television (to be received on "TV sets"), broadband (on "computers") and telephony (on "phones"). To adorn such familiar objects as televisions, computers and phones with quotation marks may seem odd, but it has become necessary. As will soon be made clear, the differences between these devices have been blurred by the advance of technology and this blurring has vital implications for the structure of the UK's media market. 

Of course, BT could charge its telephone users a fee for broadcasting material on top of the phone bill. On November 11 BT announced that it had bought the rights to screen 350 top football matches with exactly that intention in mind. The threat to BskyB's business model is so obvious that its share price fell by almost 10 per cent, and its market capitalisation by over £1 billion, within minutes of the announcement. It had not been expected that BT would attack BSkyB so directly and so soon. A big competitive battle is now under way. 

However, a key point must be noticed. The internet now has other quite well-established ways of charging "viewers". All providers of content via the internet, and not just BT or another telephone companies, can restrict access to their material by using widely available software. They can then allow viewing of the material only to people who pay, typically by means of a credit card. The internet therefore becomes the vehicle not so much of broadcasting as of "narrowcasting", understood as the channelling of specialised content to a well-defined and limited market. Technology is advancing so quickly that the "narrowcast" material no longer has to be pre-recorded, but can be live and sent out in real time. So the big broadcasters are not only competing among themselves, they are also competing with a range of internet-based rivals (bloggers selling advertising space, porn channels charging subscriptions, price comparison websites for antiques being financed by auctioneers, and so on). 

In short, "broadcasting" may ultimately cease to exist as a category distinct from "communication" in general. Performances of all sorts are conveyed to customers by an assortment of technologies and financed by a number of payment arrangements. Broadcasting may have begun as the most obvious example of a public good that was also a "natural monopoly", but new technologies changed that monopoly into a duopoly and then an oligopoly, and now they are changing it again into an extreme example of chaotic, undisciplined and vibrant competition.