The fight over football

The digital future - it's here already, isn't it? If you watched Manchester United v Arsenal on Sky Sports last week, you would have seen the ceaseless promotions: how much more you'd be getting out of this match, we were told, if only you were watching it on Sky Sports Extra, one of BSkyB's digital-TV services.

Yes, whenever you wanted, at the touch of a button on the remote, you could have instant replays, multiple camera angles - look, here's what it would be like if we ever managed to get tickets for Old Trafford and got stuck behind the goal - match statistics and (maybe most intriguingly) the PlayerCam: a continuous shot isolating a selected player, whose identity changes ever 15 minutes.

So, with the PlayerCam, for 15 minutes of the first half you could have enjoyed the rare sight of Roy Keane watching a game pass him by; and for another quarter-hour you would have the definitive answer to the question ordinary analogue viewers were asking each other: "Where's Beckham anyway?"

The hype begs the question of whether we actually want all this, of whether the collective nature of watching a match on telly - when we all see the same shots and replays, all hear the same comments and analysis - isn't a big part of its appeal. You only have to picture the row over who controls the remote in a crowded pub to realise that the "Extra" vision of football-viewing is essentially a private, domestic one.

And it's also a side-show. The push to get viewers to switch to digital is actually less about changing the way we watch football than about changing the way we pay for it. Make no mistake - all that button-pushing is important for marketing new media. As a British journalist put it last November: "The industry is united about one aspect of interactivity: it matters. It could prove to be the `killer application' which entices people to invest in digital and subscription TV."

And interactivity is also important in the same way that it is vital to the commercial development of the Internet. The long-awaited day when you can shop through your television is finally close to hand, and broadcasters could get a few pennies of every pound you point-click-and-spend.

In Britain, thanks to shrewd marketing and lots of free decoder boxes, more than two million users are already digitised, between digital satellite, digital terrestrial and digital cable services. In Ireland the same choices will apply: Digico, with RTE as its main player, will be providing digital terrestrial services by the end of the year, with new RTE-based news and "youth" stations planned; NTL, which now owns Cablelink and is a massive communications multinational company - with Microsoft owning a significant shareholding - is busily readying customers for digital TV and Internet through the cable box; and there's nothing to stop you already from buying into Rupert Murdoch's Sky Digital, via a satellite dish.

It's via satellite or cable that the largest number of stations potentially come into play - literally hundreds. So instead of Sky Sports offering two or three matches a week to its subscribers, it can potentially offer every match in the Premiership, live and in its entirety - at the push of a few more buttons, and for a pay-per-view price. And it's not just sport. A wide range of films, concerts and other desirable programmes can be available, the rights paid for not by your licence fee or by advertisers, but directly by you, every time you watch.

American expert Franklin Getchell, writing in the Guardian, couldn't be clearer about the outcome: "More channels will mean worse programming." His logic? "The overall number of viewers doesn't increase, it just divides. Instead of everybody watching four channels, the same number of people will be watching a hundred. And with fewer people watching each channel, there will be less income, as measured by subscriber fees or advertising revenue, to devote to programming.

"While the new programming may be innovative and wonderful in many ways, it will look worse than programming costing a hundred times as much. Programming has begun to look worse just as home videos have begun to look better, thanks to improving technology. The more programming resembles home videos, the less we regard it as professional. The less, therefore, we are inclined to make appointments to view. We have less loyalty to channels because we don't really care about their programmes. We aren't at home as much, anyway. Despite there being more to watch, we end up watching less."

Digital TV will allow us to customise our schedule, to select from a huge range of programmes and watch them when we want to. "We'll each be a niche," Getchell says. "Niche viewing of niche channels with really cheap programming."