Can traditional broadcasters survive in the digital age?

Google will make more advertising revenues in the UK this year than Channel 4, according to Andy Duncan, the broadcaster’s chief executive. Can broadcasters survive in an era of fragmenting audiences and advertising revenues? Can traditional media models cope with the threat from online rivals and provide effective competition in public service broadcasting?

Online rivals like Yahoo and Google put pressure on TV broadcasters like BBC or Channel 4 because of their large audiences which cut the main advertising revenues and thus make a real competition to them.
But Broadcaster's audience remain stable even if the users of Internet grew bigger and bigger in the past years.
People still rely on TV informations by watching evening News which main advantage is to give a life time images from all over the world and to make more entertaining programs for large audience such as kids or old people which couldn't use new technologies like the middle aged adults.
The competition for advertising revenues is still
rude and the young companies like Google are fighting for getting more everyday audience.
We can see that users of Internet like young students have their own lap top computer at home so most families could have the opportunity to be connected to Internet at their homes.
Since Internet is available 24 hours a day this is very importnat to those who don't want to wait for certain hours to watch a special tv programme:news could be spotted from web at any time.
Probably the traditional media model will have to coop with these changes and make itself more interactive by using in appropriate way new technologies.

but...

It boils down to the consumer's choice of content.

Google offers instant access to the information or media of the consumer's choice.

Channel 4 offers a bland diet of soap operas, boring celebs and ethnic stuff

If consumers are migrating to on-line entertainment then we should allow Channel 4 to die gracefully and not try to prolong the life of the corpse by injecting public money.