LONDON — While trawling the globe for stories in the run-up to this year’s MIPTV, I couldn’t help but notice that most of the world’s public-service broadcasters are suffering from severe financial cramps at the moment.

As Canadians, you know about the pressures being faced by the CBC. And you might also have noticed cutbacks at WNET13 in New York. But did you know that pubcasters like the BBC, NHK, SABC, Danmarks Radio, ABC Australia, TV New Zealand and TV France are also struggling to make ends meet? In fact, the only pubcaster unaffected seems to be Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, which continues to enjoy a monopoly status in its market.

One reason for all this pubcaster pain is, of course, the global recession, which has demolished ad revenues and choked ancillary revenues. But there also seems to be a shift in attitude away from the traditional publicly funded broadcaster model.

Pubcasters can always pull up a survey in which audiences say they offer value for money. But the more that TV resembles the retail environment, the less happy audiences seem to be about having money docked directly from their pay packets.

It isn’t that they don’t value what they get from pubcasters, it’s more that they don’t like the fact they can’t choose whether or not to pay. It’s like being told what flavor ice cream to buy.

So how should politicians and regulators respond? Should they champion the pubcaster cause or let the poor beasts stumble towards extinction? Well the message implicit in the current recession is that pubcasting needs protection from policy-makers, because the alternative scenario is pretty bleak.

Pay-TV, for example, is okay as far as it goes. But it flatters itself when it claims to stand for unlimited choice. Look closely at the schedules of themed networks and you can see how most major players have started to coalesce around an editorial axis consisting of sport, Hollywood and homogenized, Americanized entertainment.

Ad-funded networks are even worse. With their commercial model in disarray, they have pinned their hopes on derivative populist entertainment and shows which seek to distort the line between editorial and advertising. Branded content sounds like an exciting concept when discussed in marketing seminars. But it has about as much appeal as junk mail when it spews out of your TV.

The beauty of the pubcaster model is that it acts as an antidote to all of this. Not only does it broaden the content base and cover essentials (news, kids, comedy), it schedules shows for commercially unattractive demographics (i.e. anyone over 30).

In a similar vein, it is pubcaster support for platforms like DTT which is combating the threat of a digital underclass developing in major markets. Just as crucially, pubcasters bring the best out of commercial rivals. In fact, they often work best when acting in harmony with the commercial sector.

Take a movie like Slumdog Millionaire, which needed public funding to get off the ground (Channel 4), but then stormed the box office courtesy of Fox Searchlight’s distribution muscle. Or Tickle Me Elmo, which is a PBS character converted into a cash cow by Tyco and Wal-Mart.

Some critics of the tax-funded pubcaster model argue that it could be replaced in its entirety in the emerging on-demand world, with audiences cherry-picking niche content to suit their tastes. But this argument is flawed because it assumes we all know what we are looking for in advance. It leaves no room to be surprised or enlightened.

Sadly for those who work in such organizations, support for pubcasters is not the same as arguing for the status quo. If the emergence of the Internet has taught us anything, it is not that the pubcaster model is dead, but that there is an argument for content creation to be outsourced in order to tap the very best talent available.

BBC director general Mark Thompson may be unpopular with his workforce for imposing huge job cuts, but he has recognized this by opening up increasing amounts of his schedule to indie content suppliers. Maintaining a modest production base in-house is important because it sustains the link between the commissioning brain and the creative heartbeat, but the pubcaster of the future is likely to be smaller and leaner.

If that’s the case, we can expect a continued migration from pubcasters to indies, but that’s not something we should be afraid of.