LAST NIGHT the leaders of Britain’s TV news industry gathered to collect the awards for another year of world-class coverage. The BBC took the lion's share of the Royal Television Society’s Journalism Awards but there were top prizes too for ITV News, Channel 4 News and Sky News.

It’s the fierce competition between the news providers that keeps the quality high. But could it be that in a fully digital future, this competition might wither and even die? Throughout the BBC’s history the consensus has been that the state, through the compulsory licence fee, intervenes in the broadcasting market to ensure that at least one broadcaster fulfils a series of important services such as the supply of high quality impartial news.

As far back as the start of ITV 50 years ago it was decided that this public good must be offset by a counter-balancing one, a fully competitive news service provided by the principal commercial network.

The three commercially funded public service broadcasters (PSBs) — ITV, Channel 4 and Five — have all guaranteed to produce high quality news in agreeing their licences to transmit — in ITV’s case until 2014. In fact news is identified by the communications regulator Ofcom as one of ITV’s key programme genres. And Ofcom defines the very first purpose of public service television as “to inform ourselves and others and to increase our understanding of the world through news, information and analysis of current events and ideas”.

So nothing will change for a few years. But as analog switch-off begins in three years’ time and especially as the London switch-off approaches in 2011, expect the rationale for such promises to come under attack. ITV’s existing management is already asking: should there be any licensing requirements once the channel loses the special privileges of being part of a five-channel universe? So, with this new challenge, plus the constantly growing number of viewing alternatives, will the game then be up for flagship half-hour news programmes on popular mainstream channels? Will we be left to the unpredictable future of loss-making news channels?

TV bulletins are still the way most people get their news, and we all want the BBC to continue to provide a high quality service. But we don’t want it to be the only one. In any normal market where one operator has the size of market share of the BBC, and its major competitor might be about to leave the field, competition authorities and regulators would feel free to intervene to prevent a dominant position being created.

Option one for a solution seems to be to require ITV, Channel Four and Five to sustain such services as a licence requirement, even if they grumble about it. This could be justified if the “must carry rule” continues to force platform operators such as Sky to give those channels the 3, 4 and 5 slots on their electronic programme guides. Even in a fully digital world, that rule does have real commercial value to these networks and they should give something in return.

Option two is to leave it to trust that the American model would work here. All the three main commercial networks in the US choose to run proper news services without being forced to.

Option three is make it more financially worthwhile for the British networks to transmit news, maybe by giving them some form of regulatory relief, such as lifting the ban on the sponsorship of TV news.

Though at first hearing this sounds like heresy to some of us with a background in traditional broadcast news, it has proved to be a useful way of helping to sustain news on public television in the United States. Perhaps an experiment with another potentially endangered species, regional news, might be a first step.

Option four — and this should be considered only in the unlikely event of all else failing — is to create a national TV news competition fund, either from public funds or money raised from broadcasters.

We also need some formula for the news channels, perhaps making a non-BBC news channel part of somebody’s PSB licence requirement in return for releasing them from some other obligation.

There’s plenty of time to consider these and other options but that’s no reason why the debate shouldn’t start sooner than the day the analog signal starts shutting down.

Stewart Purvis is a former chief executive of ITN. This article is based on his fourth and final lecture as News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media at Oxford University

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