SUMMER’S over in television land — the Edinburgh television festival begins today, which means that it is time for extravagant new ideas.

Everyone has to have a new idea for the autumn, preferably made up on the journey to Scotland, and doubtless one glance at the YouTube website will prompt new thinking about the death of traditional television (that’s the stuff from old-fashioned outfits like ITV and the BBC).

Earlier this month, Ofcom, the pointy-headed regulator, stoked excitement by observing that 16 to 24-year-olds watch seven hours’ less television a week than the rest of us as they play online or elsewhere.

This statement of the obvious — university has always been more exciting than Panorama — can lead to all sorts of excessive conclusions. The truth is that, as long as traditional broadcasters keep evolving, they have less to worry about than is commonly supposed, and, of course, every student will soon be able to watch Countdown between midnight and 1am in the computer room as the essay crisis looms.

Ofcom reckons that the proportion of 16-24s watching a quarter of an hour’s worth of telly a week is 84 per cent. Depending on where you start, this is either the beginnings of a downward trend, or not much change. The equivalent figure was 87 per cent in 2001, but 84 per cent in 2002. Indeed, despite the competing distractions of computer games and the not-so-new-idea of reading, TV-watching across the whole population has edged up by 11 minutes to 25 hours, 34 minutes, a week since 2001.

OK, now imagine you’re important enough to be rehearsing your interview to be the next chief executive of ITV. Because ITV’s website is, frankly, rubbish, a key part of the pitch will be to announce that ITV is doomed unless it can harness the internet dollar by buying Bebo, or whatever. Well, ITV does need to diversify into other media, but curiously, the established broadcasters have been doing better than expected in the multi-channel era.

Yet, while traditional free-to- air channels have been declining in the face of multi-channel telly, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are all gaining ground across their portfolio as their digital spin-offs grow rapidly. Over the past four years, all three broadcasters’ share in multi-channel homes is actually up; while pay channels — particularly those owned by Sky – have suffered as Freeview, where they are not present, has taken off. Traditional multi-channel owners, who had been making a nice living reshowing Friends, are having to rethink in a hurry.

So, what about the “youf” viewer? At Edinburgh, on Saturday, a panel will discuss the proposition that 16 to 34-year-old viewers would rather do something else than watch television. But the reality is that, if you give younger consumers programming they like, they will watch it.

More Gardeners’ World may not be the answer, although that’s on broadband too, but the strength of X-Factor and Big Brother — with a hero whose Tourette syndrome makes swearing on live television acceptable — shows that broadcasters have done a reasonable job at reacting to the massive changes in attitudes over the past decade.

After all, viewers have always liked soap operas; the recent growth has been in real-life soap operas, otherwise known as reality shows. The question is whether broadcasters can harness people’s growing desire to star in the shows themselves, which is what MySpace and the other social networking websites are all about.

Perhaps the next big prize is to find the format that fuses internet networking with television — a kind of Blind Date where viewers send in videos extolling their own merits and the contestant picks the winner. Or something like that.

So maybe Charles Allen can stay on at ITV — especially now that Andy Duncan, the boss of Channel 4, doesn’t want his job — at least after the website is improved a bit.

Well, maybe not; to say that the big broadcasters of today have nothing to worry about is an exaggeration. Advertisers, in particular, are not behind free-to-air TV in strength and ad revenues seem unable to develop much beyond £3.5 billion, at a time when pay-TV income is increasing by £300 million to £400 million a year. In other words, ad-funded television is now a mature market.

Yet, the small screen is the dominant medium in British people’s lives — young or old; it is, after all, the only medium where people are prepared to have opinions about programmes they have never seen. As long as broadcasters keep up with the audience, reports about the demise of TV are greatly exaggerated.

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