When we lived in Sweden, we had cable TV. It was quite handy, really - as well as getting broadband, we could watch a bunch of TV in English - as the Swedes subtitle rather than dub. But the two channels we were most grateful of were BBC World and BBC Prime. After all, it's always nice to relax with a bit of telly from your own country - even if BBC Prime did show an alarming tendency to show wall to wall Keeping Up Appearances (and to get an idea of the sort of people that like THAT show, click on the link at your own peril).

Now we're in France, the problem has been one of dubbing. I hate dubbing, and my French isn't really good enough to follow the dialogue as yet. So the cable TV issue was rather different - was it worth getting cable in order to be able to watch World, Prime and the other English language channels (the sort of hotel TV we've all spent the odd evening being forced to watch).

But the solution is something else: downloading. With Bittorrent, we can get TV from the UK and the US by grabbing it off the Internet overnight, burning it onto a CD and sticking it in the DVD player. Perfect. ER, Green Wing, West Wing and so on a day after they're originally transmitted.

I suppose it's a slightly less convenient and intelligent version of TiVo, the hard-disk video recorder that allows you to choose what you watch and when you watch it. It even allows you to skip the ads, which is where I have to take a professional interest.

Advertisers, TV companies and ad agencies are crapping themselves about TiVO. And well they should, because it challenges the status quo. In the industry in which I work; the 30 second TV commercial has long been king. It still is, in the sense that it's still seen as the zenith of a campaign (and, I suspect, marketing directors like to sit at home in the evenings surrounded by bats and drinking their glass of virgin's blood and feel the thrill of seeing THEIR ad on TV).

But what is the point of the TV commercial when nobody appears to be watching, and a fair number of those are skipping the commercials? And why spend a squillion dollars on a TVC that you can't track, when you could spend a few thousand on a carefully targeted DM piece and know not only that the right people will see it, but also know exactly whether they responded or not?

Is, to put it boldly, the TV commercial dead?

Well, not really. It still has a place for FMCG goods like soft drinks, cosmetics and the like that are principally sold to that critical 15-24 age group, because they still watch TV. It has a place for the seniors too, because they're also watching the box while ruminating on their incontinence, mobility and gardening problems. It still has a place for one-off spots during events like the World Cup and the Superbowl.

But those epic Guinness, Ford and other commercials you used to see trailed in the press and even in outdoor campaigns that would air for the first time during the middle break in the 10 o'clock news? Forget it. Those days have gone.

Nobody's watching, nobody cares.