This week, I look at the future of television content and offer some optimism for how production companies and programme makes can pave their way to a sustainable future.

We know that these are turbulent, insecure times. The commercial broadcasters are watching their traditional sources of income dwindle, the BBC is fighting to keep the licence fee revenue to itself, Ofcom is offering Channel Four a choice of shotgun weddings to Five or to BBC Worldwide, and all the terrestrials are likely to screen more repeats through 2009 at the cost of new commissions. Where’s the good news?

As long as you are a programme-maker or a production company executive, and you probably are if you’re reading this in the first place, then this is an exciting time of opportunity and change for you personally. Whatever massive shifts the mass broadcasting media are undergoing, viewers will always want professionally made, editorially intelligent programmes and content to watch. That means there will always be work for you to do. But it probably won’t be for traditional one-way broadcast television programmes in the long run, and you could find that getting paid is a more complex business than before.

What matters more to you? That a mass audience watches your production and engages with it lightly, or that a smaller audience of people who really care about the subject chooses to take part, feeds back to you and contributes to your project? If it’s the former, then you should really plan for the future and concentrate on making those live unmissable landmark broadcasts which diverse people can talk about as a common experience (great sports coverage, international news broadcasts, X Factor and Glastonbury…).

“If you care about the engaged niche audience who will come back for more, then you’re on – and it may pay you more in the longer run. Does it matter whether your programme is watched via a phone, a tv, a computer, a Play Station, or a fridge?”

The broadcasters know this stuff already, which is why the BBC already makes world-class online content, all of the terrestrials are working hard to provide high-quality online catch-up TV, and several are pulling together to put their Freeview transmissions online too. The government sees the writing on the wall, which is why its Digital Britain report demands broadband access for everyone in the country, and why most new TV sets now have a broadband socket built-in. Back to you, this means that you are going to have the best kind of audience that programme-makers have ever had – people who will repeatedly go out of their way to watch what you make and engage with it actively, as long as you make what they care about.

Enough of the utopian flag-waving, what does this actually mean for you? The power of the television commissioners to decide what people watch en masse is waning fast – instead you have the ability to make your own programmes and find your own audience directly.

“You can’t rely on those same commissioners to fund your productions in advance like before, but even in times of recession there is a lot of money out there to fund productions if you can find it.”

Marketers and advertisers with budgets to spend still revere your professional skills more than you probably do, they think that what you do is inexplicable, and they’ve been led by media agencies to believe that it costs very much more to make than it really costs you.

There are thousands of companies out there already working in new ways and for new markets, many with no broadcast background. For a brief picture of what some less-conventional but still broadcast-centric companies are doing so far, take a look at Guardian Films, Illumina, CC Lab and VideoJug and they all rely on skilled programme-makers.