The Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention is a highlight on the calendar of the media elite. At this year's convention, which begins this morning, the discussion will centre on the challenges that the internet poses for broadcasters.

The star guest is Terry Semel, the chairman and chief executive of Yahoo!, the internet portal that claims to be the world’s most popular website. The timing is excellent: Yahoo! this week announced its first major move into content production. The website has recruited Kevin Sites, a war journalist, to report from the world’s conflict zones.

Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone is being billed as "news reporting for the new millennium - a nexus of backpack journalism, narrative story-telling techniques, and the internet, designed to reach a global audience hungry for information".

Mr Sites will travel with a pack of portable digital technology, but without a crew, to shoot, write, edit and transmit daily reports "from nearly every region of the world through stories, photos, video and audio".

In this respect his work will echo that of the "citizen journalists" and bloggers who have delivered pictures from their mobile phones at the Asian tsunami last Christmas, the July 7 London bombings and Hurricane Katrina to television screens around the world – another development that will figure highly in discussions at Cambridge. Companies such as Cisco, the IT company whose products form the backbone of the web, are already discussing how they can cater for "user generated content" and are moving into building set-top boxes for the next generation of TV services.

Meanwhile, the Ashes Test cricket series illustrated the shift in viewing habits brought about by access to high-speed broadband internet connections that allow people to follow news and sports events on their PCs.

England’s Ashes triumph led to "a huge surge in website traffic that shows 'watching' sport at work is now a mainstream trend", according to research by SciVisum, the internet technology company.

Significantly, this week, as part of a three-year extension to the £83 million-a-year European Champions League football deal between ITV and BSkyB (which is owned by News Corporation, the ultimate owners of Times Online), there was provision for both broadcasters to make its match coverage available on the internet, for a fee, but not restricted to those who subscribe to the Sky Sports television service.

The television executives who pay large sums for the broadcasting rights to sporting events are keeping close tabs on moves towards "webcasting". Executives are already asking whether piracy could hit the TV world as it did the music industry, when people started to download music for free for file-sharing websites.

And advertisers are asking themselves whether expensive TV campaigns are worth spending money on when consumers are being given the option of skipping ad breaks using products such TiVo or HomeChoice, the programming on demand services.

eBay's purchase of Skype, the internet telephone company throws another factor into the mix. The combination of the two companies' technologies is likely to open the way for "pay-per-call" advertising, where advertisers pay for sales leads brought to them via the internet and over the phone.

"Will traditional forms of linear TV such as domestic drama struggle to find sufficient income streams?" the Cambridge Convention will ask. And if so, who will step into the breach to produce such public sector broadcasting. Should it be left to the BBC or is there another viable model?

There will also be discussions over the quality of programming today. Paul Abbott will lament "low-rent, low-ambition drama being hailed for its viewing figures".

The writer behind State of Play and Shameless will argue in the Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture that the "audience is still out there somewhere, gagging for a few high-protein nuggets to tempt them home".

Debates over the value of Big Brother and other reality shows is likely to stretch well into the night in Cambridge's bars. But the main question at the convention is likely to be just how people will access television content in the future and, as the RTS puts it: "who in the new media world is going to eat whose lunch?"

Also from the Convention:

Tessa Jowell and the digital switchover

Abbott wails at declines in drama

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