We are always being told that the web is a lean-forward medium and television is a lean-back one.

Actually the TV is more of a slouch-back medium, feet on the coffee table, brain unengaged, savoury snacking type of experience - well at least it is in my house.

Theoretically, when we use the web, we are supposed to interact with the content, not snack, our cerebella lobes fully activated.

But the lines between broadcast mediums and on-demand ones is becoming blurred thanks to the ubiquity of broadband and all the other usual technology suspects, line WiFi, podcasting and 3G.

There are now episodes of many popular TV shows being offered for download from the web and some, like Channel 4's The IT Crowd, being offered online before their terrestrial broadcast.

Admittedly, The IT Crowd might have a slightly geekier consumer, but 370,000 people watch it on their computers, a significant fraction of the 1.6 million who watch it on TV.

However, both the BBC and ITV have plans to release episodes of their flagship soaps, 'Corrie' and 'Enders', over the web at the same time as they are broadcast.

We've been predicting that the TV and the PC will merge at a hardware level for years, but who would have thought the fusion would happen at a content level first. Television has taken a step into the digital middle ground too. Inter-active or iTV can provide email, games, shopping and more recently has made ondemand entertainment a reality too with TiVo, SkyPlus and other digital playback services. But the PC is winning hands down.

Thanks to WiFi, we can sit on our couches with our laptop watching and listening and not just interacting. Content delivered by the web can be carried with us outside our homes too on our iPods and mobile phones.

ITV has plans to release specially edited episodes of Corrie to the 3G networks, giving birth to a new buzzword "mobisode"; a word I suspect we will hearing more of. Remember - you heard it hear first.

How the advertising model works with online delivery I'll let the executives at ITV work out. It is easy to see why the BBC and even governmentowned Channel 4 can pioneer the delivery of traditionally broadcast content over the web, where advertisements will not be tolerated or automatically edited out by the consumer.

Even now traditional TV advertising is under threat. Back in the Eighties popular programmes like The Two Ronnies pulled audiences of 16 million per show. Now with so many channels and the web to choose from, what is considered a good rating is a tenth of that.

Perhaps the greatest social effect the internet will have is its part in the demise of broadcasting. Our grandchildren will laugh when we tell them that millions of people made an appointment with their TV each week to passively receive the same programmes littered with commercial messages.