This is partly a qualitative judgment. Television, people now routinely say, is terrible. We don’t like watching stupid people doing stupid things, as in Big Brother and his oafish cousins, and we don’t like watching clever people doing stupid things, as in most current documentary shows. We don’t like celebrities, we don’t like soaps and we don’t like seeing people having their houses, gardens or faces made over. In the morning, we don’t like the simpering of Natasha Kaplinsky or the infantile, sofa-bound coarseness of GMTV.

Most mainstream British television, most of the time, is now too awful even to consider watching, even if, occasionally, one finds oneself seeing it.

However, the real reason we have all stopped watching is that we have started to realise we don’t have to. The grip of the network schedules on our screen time is at last being loosened by technology.

This has long been promised. The advent of the VCR convinced many that scheduled television was doomed, but the machines were too clunky and complex. Equally, in 1995, I was shown a video-on-demand system by Microsoft, but it didn’t work anywhere except in that one room in Seattle. The arrival of the internet on the mass market was, once again, taken to signify the end of television as we know it. But broadband was a long time coming, and still can’t cope with high-quality television pictures or produce easily usable technologies and accessible content. Meanwhile, a mass of mobile technologies has seemed to provide little more than pictures of drunk people at parties being flashed from phone to phone.

Tech-heads can get excited about this stuff, and Bill Gates can keep promising the road ahead, but it will all mean nothing if nobody buys it — and for a long time, nobody did. Network television, broadcasting at scheduled times, kept its hold on the viewer like a drunken bore in a pub.

Three things have happened to get rid of this monster, and many more are about to happen. The first is the vertiginous drop in the price of computer memory, which makes the digital recording and manipulation of video material easy and cheap enough for just about everybody. Within three years or so, your domestic hard disks will be able to hold thousands of movies and hundreds of hours of network television — everything, in fact, one could conceivably want to watch. The signi-ficance of this memory explosion has not yet been grasped by either consumers or companies. If, in effect, I can store everything, then I become my own provider. How companies deal with this financially is anybody’s guess.

Second, the internet has begun to work as it should. Thanks to broadband, students now routinely download the best television shows — at the moment, that means the US hospital comedy Scrubs — over the net and, happily, pass them on to me. Video is now at the same stage as audio was when Napster first started. Just as MP3 chipped away at the foundations of the record industry, so video downloading is subverting television and film. One estimate suggests that media companies will have lost $160 billion to video piracy by 2010.

Google and Yahoo!, once the outlaws and now the marshals of the internet wild west, are both working on video search engines; BT is starting its own entertainment division to provide net content; and so on. But, equally important, people have begun to realise that the net is more fun and useful than television. We can find out more about any subject via Google in five minutes than we can from hundreds of hours of over-produced TV documentaries. Watching television has suddenly begun to seem a thin and narrow experience; indeed, surveys are now showing that people watch less television as a result of using the internet. The change in advertising patterns is following this trend, with advertising money migrating increasingly from television to the net.

The third development is DVD. This works better and offers more than the old video tapes. The trend towards watching movies on DVD has already sent tremors through Hollywood. US cinema box-office revenues have slumped for three successive years — by 4%, 2% and 8% — and studios now routinely make more on DVD than they do on theatrical releases.

Television will suffer the same effect. Already, the box set of DVDs of a show is more of an event than the original broadcast. The idea of waiting all week for one half-hour episode is now absurd. Far better to watch six episodes in an evening and avoid the surrounding dross. And that is exactly what young people now do. Network television is, for almost everybody under 30, desperately unhip, a sure sign that scheduled broadcasting is on its deathbed.

All that has happened already, creating an awareness and a growing confidence that people can have what they want when they want it, whether it is information or entertainment. In practice, this awareness is slightly premature, because the technology is not quite in place. The tech-heads, of course, think it is. They rave, for example, about the Media Center edition of Microsoft’s Windows, which provides huge memory and enormous ability to manipulate video and network it around the home. But nobody other than the tech-heads understands it, and Microsoft, with its usual ineptitude in the consumer market, can’t explain it.

It is, however, the mobile technology yet to come that will kill old-fashioned television stone dead. All the developments so far still mean you have to be sitting in something like your living room. The next phase will let you watch anywhere. This phase has so far been concealed from us by the failure of 3G telephone technology to deliver anything like the quality and capability we were promised.

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