As the emergence of YouTube and the BBC’s iPlayer shows, online video is the undisputed “killer app”, the feature that will crown the next wave of media celebs, moguls and influencers, and sink those who cling to the old model. Ignore it at your peril.

This is a reassuring thought for those of us who live in countries where network television has become truly unwatchable, a casualty of cost-conscious suits, or perhaps the local despot, who needs a channel dedicated to military parades and monuments in his honour. Closer to home, flip around the dial during primetime hours and you will be sure to find at least one channel that nobody watches. It’s an unloved bit of broadcast spectrum where, if the owners were to broadcast a running loop of CCTV footage, they would score higher ratings.

If you are lucky, there will be just one barren channel where you live. In Italy, from where I write, most evenings there are seven truly unwatchable national broadcast channels. What confounds me is that they are uniquely unwatchable. You have a choice between guess-what’s-in-the-box game shows; guess-what’s-in-the-head-of-creepy-balding-right-wing-politician talk shows; on the opposing channels, it’s guess-what’s-in-the-head-of-protectionist-left-wing-politician-with-good-hair talk shows; sing-along variety shows with the national cleavage team and Big Brother, a programme now owned by the same mogul, Silvio Berlusconi, who owns the TV station.

When this mogul wins the parliamentary elections here next week, as just about everybody predicts, we can expect more airtime for his friends on the right, but otherwise little will change on the dial. It will be the same uninspired line-up. Yes, with a victory at the polls next week, Mr Berlusconi will have control of six out of the seven national broadcast channels, a calculation that sounded awfully worrisome to political observers just a few years ago. These days, who cares? He can have them! No one’s watching.

Mr Berlusconi’s rise from property developer to media mogul to Italy’s most powerful politician was built on powerful political connections and on Italy’s once-great love affair with television. He used his national TV network to become the country’s most visible force, an aspirational figure to many, a villain to others. His grand plan in the 1980s to stitch together a commercial TV network from disparate regional broadcasters, effectively busting up Rai’s statutory monopoly, was a stroke of brilliance. It may not have been completely legal, but it launched the Italian broadcast sector into the modern era and ordinary Italians seemed to think it va bene cosi.

But these days, Mr Berlusconi’s media influence, which includes TV, book publishing, magazine, newspaper, cinema, advertising and AC Milan, is old media, which is to say, in decline. Shares in the Berlusconi-controlled Mediaset are down 40 per cent since Mr Berlusconi lost the previous national election in April 2006, suggesting that investors see the stock as nothing more than a political play: buy when the boss is in office, get out fast when he’s shown the door. Mediaset has become a metaphor for Italian politics. It’s a personality-driven shop that offers little clarity for the future.

A year ago when I was covering Mediaset for Variety there was repeated clamour among analysts for the cash-rich company to abandon its long-running pursuit of the Big Brother production house Endemol and instead diversify into a new frontier, online media. What did it do? It joined forces with founder Jon de Mol and Goldman Sachs to buy Endemol for €3.4 billion. The price tag was a good billion euros higher than that of YouTube and MySpace combined (from the previous year). With the deal, Mediaset was sending a message: the future is reality TV and game shows. Investors were not pleased, and they sent a message too: shares have fallen a further 25 per cent since the deal was announced.

Not surprisingly, on the eve of this year’s election the media pundits are saying little about Mr Berlusconi’s soon-to-be unparalleled control of the national airwaves. Control of TV? It hardly sounds menacing. It will be control of the same uninspiring medium that attracts fewer and fewer Italians, fewer still young Italians. It’s becoming more difficult to see what trouble Mr Berlusconi could actually stir up with a lock on the TV spectrum.

For political allies, Mediaset investors and Italian TV viewers, this is worrying. But it’s not that bad, really. They too are fewer and fewer.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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