Now that the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival is over, what can we learn from what happened there, and (perhaps more importantly) did the attendees learn anything from the experience as well?

For starters, Peter Fincham's keynote speech is a curious echo of the last MacTaggart speech made by Charles Allen in 2006 shortly before he left ITV, except that ITV's predicament is if anything several times worse now than what it was two years ago. That 2006 speech also 'brought the house down' (at the time) but we all know what happened next.

Move forward two years and the UK economy (hence ITV's potential ad revenues) appears to be on the brink of recession as well as Google (and other web-based advertising) continuing to eat away at UK television broadcasters' profits. Plus BSkyB's shareholding has blocked a 'sugar daddy' takeover (what was and is the biggest hope for ITV).

One issue is that ITV's programming has barely progressed beyond what it was two years ago - the return of News At Ten was perhaps the bravest move made by Michael Grade, but like the proverbial boy who cried wolf it seems that viewers aren't exactly watching the bulletin in their droves because few people seem to treat ITV seriously any more.

And that's the problem for ITV. Indeed it's the light entertainment (The X-Factor, Britain's Got Talent) that's keeping ITV plc's head above water from a financial perspective but in turn is doing nothing to advance its credibility, and with things like contract rights renewal still in the way it means that ITV still cannot afford to take real risks.

This was strongly alluded to with the pleas made by Peter Fincham earlier during the festival in relation to releasing ITV from its public service commitments, namely if Ofcom were to leave ITV to its own devices we would end up with 'better' programming. (So they honestly want us to believe, despite historical precedents that strongly suggest otherwise.)

However this sentiment not only clashes with Ofcom's historical loosening of ITV's commitments (which have had minimal or no effect in terms of programme quality) as well as the fact that a fair number of people actually enjoyed watching the types of programming that ITV no longer seems willing to produce. (More than they seem to think.)

Not everybody loves The X-Factor, you know.

Don't get me wrong - the issue of contract rights renewal in particular needs resolving as a matter of urgency (Google has no such restrictions for one thing), but nobody in a government currently more concerned with its own survival will have that as a priority issue in their in tray. And ITV still needs some form of regulation just to protect it from itself.

So if the current regulatory system is hobbling ITV close to breaking point, then it's perhaps best to just rip up the old Channel 3 franchise system and start again afresh, maybe implementing a US-style affiliate system with a central sustaining feed (as previously suggested by various people).

But that of course will require a whole new Communications Act, which won't happen until well after the next election, and the commercial sector has spent so much time and effort bashing the BBC in the meantime that the licence fee will probably be reformed/abolished first by central government before ITV's problems are properly attended to.

Such problems will continue to hinder any new owner of ITV plc, and if ITV doesn't step up its own production quota drastically (and soon), then the broadcaster may turn out to be a poisoned chalice for RTL or whoever ends up being brave enough to take on the ITV problem.

These days it seems that the major US networks (apart from Fox of course with its BSkyB connection) are now more interested in the production side of things, with NBC's recent acquisition of Carnival being a pointer to a future where the content providers may take over from broadcasters in order of importance as a result of video-on-demand services.

Except of course when a broadcaster also happens to be known for its own productions, which is where the recent attempts to boost the importance of ITV Productions comes into play, but so far this has had minimal effect (yet another frustration for the current regime at ITV plc) largely due to the aforementioned factors that affect risk-taking.

The problem of course could be that the 'best' solution for rescuing the Channel 3 system may be actively disliked by ITV plc, therefore ITV itself won't campaign for such a solution unless someone else who's hugely influential lobbies Parliament for such a change, or (even less likely) such an idea has managed to independently gain support as a policy.

Therefore it ultimately looks as if ITV is doomed to stumble from one crisis to another in the current uncertain economic climate whilst waiting for a foreign investor to bail out the leaky boat and/or someone in government to actually realise what the problem is as opposed to what various interest groups have been lobbying for over the years.

Which, as we all know, will take quite some time under the current circumstances.

The death of Bill Cotton perhaps signifies a form of closure for an era that arguably represented the pinnacle of BBC light entertainment and may never ever be repeated within our lifetime, especially as the set of circumstances which gave rise to the performers of that era was more or less a one-off.

Modern requirements of target audience box-ticking may conspire against many forms of serious talent development nowadays, and this is all too noticeable in the forms of entertainment that are commissioned for channels with a narrow remit such as BBC Three.

The very tight budget that these channels have doesn't help matters either, especially as traditional large studio-based forms of light entertainment are very costly to produce as opposed to cheap reality TV formats that attract nearly as many viewers if successful. (And there's less to lose as well if they fail for whatever reason.)

Series such as Upstaged on BBC Three may be promoting new talent but it's talent predominantly targeted at or judged by the BBC Three target audience as opposed to a mass audience, which is now primarily left to the likes of Britain's Got Talent which has a fairly narrow set of selection criteria combined with a limited window of opportunity to get noticed.

It is saddening to read reports of auditions for the current crop of reality TV-inspired talent shows where obviously very talented individuals are rejected purely on the grounds that they don't quite fit with the notion of what's required for that particular show, whilst other performers who are clearly not that good get invited back for second auditions.

This is morally degrading for both groups of individuals since the former have to resort to attempting other methods to break into the industry, whilst the latter gain unrealistic expectations of stardom. Of course there's always the likes of YouTube for talent spotting but traditional television is still the only place for ambitious concepts to be realised.

Television may never gain its next Morecambe and Wise until television executives break their continual obsession with giving talentless wanabees their five minutes of fame, but unfortunately the only way that this cycle will be broken is if more emphasis is placed on other forms of talent spotting and promotion.

No that's not a typo - both programmes had exactly the same name, which must surely be a first in companion programme name titling and ends up being rather confusing all round to boot. You can imagine the continuity announcements now.

"On BBC One now, Britain from Above, whilst on BBC Two in sixty minutes, it's Britain from Above".

"And Andrew Marr will be back with more Britain from Above next week at the same time, but on BBC Two now you can see Britain from Above with Andrew Marr."

"Don't forget, we've got Britain from Above in 30 minutes here on BBC Two. No, not that Britain from Above. The other one. The little one. The one where Andrew Marr talks about London's history, rather than the GPS trail of bin wagons. No, we don't think the naming of two different programmes with the same name makes much sense either but I'm sure it seemed a good idea at the time. After all, we regularly show Coast as 10 minute blocks, and Coast as a whole hour long programme don't we?"

At the moment this story has only appeared on one website as well as being fairly one-sided (there's no rebuttal from Sky), so bear this in mind when considering its overall accuracy, but it does raise an interesting issue that has received surprisingly little attention within the media: namely why Freesat still has fewer channels than Sky Digital.

Before May of this year, BSkyB had an almost total monopoly in relation to UK satellite television, with the only truly non-Sky alternative being a free-to-air satellite receiver perhaps combined with programme guide information sourced from the internet; a combination never actively marketed and was possibly too technical for the average viewer.

Until of course Freesat came along, which finally introduced an easy non-Sky alternative for satellite television along with a degree of marketing to back it up. This is particularly worrying for Sky even though it has its own Freesat equivalent, since in the minds of many consumers, Sky TV equals pay-TV due to Sky's successful long term marketing.

And given the amount of effort Sky had previously put into derailing Virgin Media's ambitions, which went as far as buying ITV shares in order to prevent a painless takeover by Virgin Media, then you can also bet that Freesat is judged by Sky to be a very serious long term threat to the Sky subscription model.

From BSkyB's perspective there's two things that it can do to reduce the Freesat threat. The obvious approach is to attract consumers into subscriptions that are more trouble than it's worth to cancel, hence the emphasis on Sky+ and "See, Speak, Surf" bundles combining pay-TV with internet and phone calls - cancel one and you have to forego the others.

The Sky+ advantage will be nullified once Freesat boxes with Sky+ equivalent (PVR) functionality appear on the market (before the end of this year, apparently), so that leaves the only other weapon in BSkyB's armoury apart from marketing, namely the possibility of making life as difficult as possible for certain channels who also want to be on Freesat.

Because BSkyB controls both the Sky Digital encryption system and the associated electronic programme guide (EPG), Freesat has to have its own separate independent EPG system, and because the Freesat EPG data has to be part of the channel (why is another issue altogether) then there's another hurdle to be overcome.

For certain channels, if new data is added to a channel that passes through a Sky-controlled part of the transmission chain then it has to be 'approved' by Sky in a process known as 'configuration'. And Sky has placed limits on the number of 'configurations' that it's prepared to make in a particular month.

Of course it's easy to state that this cuts down on the monthly administrative workload for Sky, but it may also be easy to argue that the administrative overhead for Sky should be relatively minimal and the actual configuration process ought to take seconds as opposed to months.

It will be very interesting to see what Ofcom's response will be to these accusations of Sky deliberately slowing down the approval process in order to restrict the number of channels available on Freesat in the short term, especially given Ofcom's recent rulings in relation to speeding up the transfer of mobile phone numbers from one network to another.

And naturally there's another course of action that could be taken via the European Commission, but that could take years as opposed to months to resolve which will do nothing to speed up the current approval process bottleneck, although BSkyB could eventually be hit with a large fine for anti-competitive practices as a result.