THE future ain’t what it used to be, according to Tessa Jowell and the brains at the Department for Culture, which is why this week’s BBC Green Paper largely tries to avoid the tricky task of making policy on the basis of predictions.

Although the policy document notes that the range of channels is exploding and that the analogue switch-off is looming, the solution to the problem is, simply, to give the BBC ten more years. Tessa’s team is desperate to avoid cooking up trendy solutions to problems, in the belief that they turn out to be short term.

This, of course, happened last time. Last decade, in a time of plenty — the first internet boom — the BBC won an above-inflation increase in the licence fee from Chris Smith, who was then the Culture Secretary. BBC executives worked tirelessly to produce projections demonstrating how the corporation would inevitably be left behind by the boom in commercial TV. Shortly after, a three-year downturn began, leaving the BBC in embarrassingly comfortable shape.

The traditional licence fee row is yet to happen this time, but avoiding trendy solutions looks like another gift to the corporation when you consider what is to come. Television has changed a lot since the present Royal Charter began in 1997, but less than you might at first think. Paid-for multichannel TV was a fact back then, although it was smaller and not really digital, but at least people watched on a television set — and there were, as now, such things as channels.

And people paid, as they do now, a licence fee. Tessa Jowell’s intention is that they will continue to pay up until December 2016. But will they? It is not yet necessary to buy a TV licence if you own a mobile phone. On third-generation (3G) mobiles, which are gradually becoming commonplace, it is already possible to watch short video clips. The technology is limited and the pricing is not yet right, but the demand is there.

The 3G market leader, 3, already has 2.5 million customers, and it has found that its subscribers want to watch music videos. In the past six months, customers have watched more than 10 million videos, mostly supplied by BMG, the music company. A clip costs £1.50, although customers can buy bundles, and 3 charges £10 a month for all you can watch. As prices fall, compression improves and new technologies emerge, how necessary will the TV set be?

News faces interesting pressures too. There is widespread agreement that news is the core of public service broadcasting, a central plank of the BBC. It has always been possible to get news without watching television, but now with broadband it is possible to watch news without a TV set. Reuters, whose editorial values mirror those espoused by the BBC, already provides an extensive selection of news clips to watch at tv.reuters.com, and the company is trying to find ways of making money from them.

The broadband picture is improving dramatically. It is only a matter of months before BT upgrades its network to a speed — 2 megabits per second — at which it will become possible to transmit good quality pictures over the phone line. It is already possible — although you have to be a geek to do it — to download US television programmes over the internet before they are shown here. Once BT acts, the visual quality will soar, and nobody will be waiting half the night to steal a march with the next Desperate Housewives episode.

Clearly it is overexcitable to predict that we will be binning TVs for mobiles in the next five years and nor is it likely that licence-fee income will fall overnight, but consumer attitudes to TV are changing fast. The much-discussed shift to multichannel, as analogue TV is switched off around the end of the decade, is just the beginning of the changes to come.

Amid this kind of ferment, it was hardly surprising that Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, was pleased with the Green Paper. He has £28 billion to play with, a guaranteed financial future at a time when the underlying technology is about to change the rules of the game.

However, it may bring long-term problems, too. The pick-and-choose model, encouraged by easy-to-use personal video recorders, as well as websites and mobiles, is here to stay — and not everybody will choose to watch, or listen to, the BBC. The corporation justifies the licence fee partly by pointing out that its services reach 93 per cent of the British public every week.

But as technology changes the rules of the game, it may be the BBC that wants to start experimenting with other forms of income generation before the licence fee model begins to break down.

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