Let's get straight to the point, because I promise you I'm going to meander a bit during the middle of this post: I think broadcast television – that is, the channel model, where you tune in to channels at specific points in time to watch episodes of your favourite shows – is dying.

More and more of us own Sky+, TiVo or DVR boxes that will record these from television and keep for us to watch at our leisure. With the exception of live events, real breaking news – I don't mean the kind of sensational crap that justifies 24-hour news channels – and some live sporting events, broadcasting through the air – from ground stations or satellites in space – to our television sets is something I don't expect to see for much longer.

Sport

You're probably aware that I'm not the biggest of football fans, but an interesting piece of news has resurfaced recently, featuring the story of the pub landlady who has won a legal battle against the Premier League, who challenged her right to screen premiership football matches using a far cheaper Greek satellite decoder.

You're probably also aware that I'm not the biggest fan of Sky, or the exorbitant and extortionate fees that it charges for access to sport – even more so given the fact that, as of next year, I will be denied access to half a season of my favourite sport, because of the deal that FOM have struck with the BBC and Sky.

The ruling itself is not surprising – it was inevitable, in my humble and quite uninformed opinion on European competition laws, that a legal challenge to the monopoly on screening rights to a member state of the EU would succeed – but what is interesting is the discussion that arises around the Premier League's ability to raise funds on its property.

Satellite killed the Free-to-Air Star

A while back, during a very interesting conversation I was having with my buddy Paul, we spoke about the topics of F1 and cricket, and how the latter's move to Sky will affect our ability to watch the races. We also spoke about how cricket – another game which suffered from a high profile move to pay-TV – underwent similar changes many years ago.

The question Paul posed during our chat was simple: did the move to pay-TV affect the audience of the game of cricket. Speaking only from my own experience, I remember watching the cricket with my Uncle Jim on television throughout the summer holidays.

On days when the weather was particularly excellent, he'd sit in the back garden with the 14" portable TV perched on a chair with a makeshift sun shade, whilst my sister and I played. Gradually, he'd explain the rules of the game and I stopped finding it boring and instead became an armchair fan. By 2006, when Sky took the rights from Channel 4, his ability – as a pensioner – to watch the cricket disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Given the current state of play in the market, unless people are paying close to £500 a year (or per month if you're a business), there is no way to watch the game of cricket on live television – for newcomers to the game, that's a shame.

I fear that the same will happen to F1.

Supporting your favourite sport

There is no doubt that Sky has, over the last 20 years, pumped billions into the top flight of English football, but Sky's 'investment' in the game hasn't reaped much in the way of reward – the last time England reached the semi-final of the World Cup was in 1990, and the last time they reached the semi-final of the European Championships was in 1996.

Then there's the sense of entitlement that a lot of players succumb to, and the lack of respect for officials and fans – there's no need for me to go on about that subject again. Add to this the fact that the excesses of money and fame have created an unsustainable future for the game – ever more evident as more clubs go into administration.

The Premier League will no doubt find a new way to secure its rights and capitalise on them from businesses, much in the way that F1 is exploring new ways to get more money from the fans of the sport. One option being the creation of the Premier League's own channel.

Many people forget F1's aborted pay-TV exercise - F1 Digital Plus, or "Bernie-Vision" as it was derisively called – which was available in the UK during the 2002 season, but throughout Europe from the 1996 season. What you got back then was very similar to what you get now – lap counters, team radio, rev counters, etc.

The choice, if you were a Sky Digital subscriber, was between watching the F1 coverage live on ITV with the adverts, or paying £12 per race weekend to watch extended coverage over multiple channels. Unsurprisingly, take-up was low, with the most popular race of the season attracting just 25,000 punters.

But what would happen if, instead of paying the middle-man broadcaster, you paid the sport directly for the coverage.

Major League Baseball as a future model

The days of negotiating rights with broadcasters are drawing to an end – as more and more people shift from traditional terrestrial, satellite and cable TV to more modern methods of streaming direct from the source, I predict that more sport, events and television shows will be broadcast directly from the providers themselves.

If you have one of the new 2nd generation Apple TV boxes, you might already be aware of a service called MLB.tv. If you're a baseball fan and an iOS or supported Android device owner, you've probably also heard of MLB At Bat.

MLB have recently announced new, simpler subscription options for their streaming and app offerings. Making things simpler – and cheaper – means that more people start to see it as a viable alternative to their overpriced broadcaster/service provider offerings. In the UK we have Sky and Virgin Media as the alternative service providers – in the states, there are more still, some with exclusive deals with the content-providers.

Instead of the competitions, leagues, sports, teams and sportsmen getting paid from the residuals of television broadcasting contracts, they're paid from a larger chunk of money coming in directly from the fans and spectators. Big chunks are no longer taken up to pay the media companies' executives, and instead, more money goes to the sport itself.

Now forget about sport for a minute

Instead of sport, think about your favourite TV show. When was the last time you were watching a television show only to see that the American TV network that comissioned it was unhappy with the viewing figures and canned the series? As a general rule of thumb now, I won't even bother watching a new show unless it's into its second series for exactly that reason.

Louis CK's "Life at the Beacon Theater" experiment has netted him over $1 million since he released it last December. Instead of going down the route of region-specific releases, going through distributors and making the material available through exclusive deals with broadcasters, he released it – at $5 – in a DRM-free format that allowed you to watch it as many times as you like, burn it to DVD or "do whatever" you like with it.

What if, instead of being beholden to TV studios and networks, the creative masses turned to the internet for distribution and Kickstarter and their likes for funding? I think the entertainment industry landscape would change altogether.

Perhaps it's already starting to.

“I finally cracked it.”

Steve Jobs is famous for a number of things but one of his major achievements was to unshackle the music industry's wares and give them a digital distribution platform worth billions of dollars. The ripples of disruption the iTunes Music Store caused still rock the industry today, where executives still hanker for a time when the customers' choices were largely dictated to them through restrictive distribution and high prices.

The last barriers to TV over IP are falling away, as broadband speed and quality continue to increase. My father-in-law, who lives beyond the brecon beacons in a deeply rural setting, gets better broadband than I do – a testament to the wireless technology that his solution operates on.

As these barriers fall away, IPTV solutions will become more prominent. Apple's hobby will, eventually, become a large scale consumer product. What Steve meant when he told Isaacson that he'd cracked it is anyone's guess – but I'm sure we'll find out one day.

What is happening, however, is that the traditional broadcasters – particularly those with no original content – will start to die out, just like the news organisations who are in the process of dying. Broadcast television will eventually go the way of the daily, largely-advertising-funded, printed newspapers.

They will be replaced by things you want to pay for, want to support, want to watch.

Which is no bad thing, surely?

On Friday, as he walked off the pitch following a dreadful performance by the England football team, Wayne Rooney - who is paid approximately £90,000 per week by Manchester United - criticised England fans, specifically the ones who booed their players off the pitch after an uneventful 90 minutes of football played against Algeria, live on television:

Granted, the statement was issued in the heat of the moment, and he's since issued an apology - one which was obviously very much 'advised' (you could say forced) - but the simple fact is that it shows the lack of respect these players have for their supporters, fans, and the people who look up to them.

No respect

Over the last two decades the salaries of the players, and ticket prices along with them, have gone through the roof. The respect and humility shown by the players, however, has not. These people who are put on marketing pedestals and who must surely forget that they are role models to tens of thousands of children across the country, cheat, dive, gamble, fight and swear. I'm no angel, but then I'm not a professional sportsman either.

Every sport has it's laws, and those laws are enforced by referees. Referees should command respect, and players should respect the referees, no matter how they feel the interpretation of the enforcement. In most other sports, this is usually how it plays out, but in football, it's not uncommon to see a player run up to a referee, get in his face, and issue expletive-ridden diatribes outlining how they feel about the last call which was given against them.

So, as role models, these people are telling those who worship them that it's okay to act like this on the pitch; it's okay to show no respect to referees or people in positions of authority; it's okay to dive and cheat; it's okay to have no integrity.

It's not okay. I can't imagine many professional rugby players showing a referee the kind of disrespect that seems to go hand in hand with the game of football - not least because they'd spend the next 10 minutes in the sin bin if they did - because they show respect to the referees, sometimes even referring to them as "sir".

Are the referees partly to blame?

I'm sure some of the football referees command respect - I can't imagine many players attempted to show Pierluigi Collina the kind of emotional outbursts that many premiership refs routinely get - but I feel that referees sometimes let things slide because of the potential explosive reactions from fans or other players or, perhaps, out of the fear of making the wrong call.

Referees get it wrong sometimes. They're not omnipresent, all-seeing, infallible beings who know exactly what happens and how, despite what Sepp Blatter, the current head of FIFA, would have you believe. Understandably, players and fans who saw different will react with varying levels of outrage.

Unlike most other sports in the world, however, there is no video replay technology that would allow teams to question borderline calls, or incidents where they had genuine reason to doubt the referee's call. The technology exists, but football refuses to adopt it.

Not really a big fan

I'll come right out and say it - I've never really been a big fan or supporter of football. I was never taken to games as a child, so never really forged a love of the game from an early age like most other people. Generally, I'll show a little more interest than usual when international tournaments crop up - the European Championships or the World Cup - as it's the national side, and it's easy to get caught up in the emotions.

Football as a sport, however, is not one I want to be associated with. It's corrupt, in a dire financial state, and full of players for whom the money and lifestyle is more important than the game itself. My buddy Paul Robert Lloyd has a far more in depth opinion on the state of football, but I'm in full agreement with him.

It'll probably come as no surprise to you, then, that the World Cup I'm more interested in starts next year.