Time was when a strike at the CBC was big news -- and not just at the CBC. The public broadcaster, of course, is inclined to treat its every bowel movement as a major national event. Doubtless you remember just where you were and what you were doing that black night in December, 1990, when the CBC broke the news that it was closing a few local stations: a story of such epochal, man-on-the-moon significance that it was splashed over two-thirds of The National and all of The Journal (as it then was).

But in the days when the CBC was one of the handful of radio or television signals the average Canadian household was capable of receiving -- not 1990, certainly, but maybe as late as the 1970s -- the prospect of such a huge part of the available broadcast spectrum even temporarily fading to black would have been the subject of enormous public interest. In the 100-channel world of the late 1990s, however, with the 500- channel, pick-and-pay, subscription TV world just around the corner, a strike-bound CBC can show nothing but Fashion File for hours on end and the public simply yawns and turns the channel.

All of which lends more than a hint of the last act of Hamlet to the fratricidal squabbling now consuming the corporation: Even as next month's crucial CRTC hearings on the "future of the CBC" are threatening, Fortinbras-like, to sweep away the old "flagship" approach to broadcast policy on which the CBC was founded, management and labour are happily hacking away at each other as if nothing had changed. Indeed, with the on-air talent set to join the striking technicians next week, it's doubtful the CBC will even be on hand to cover the proceedings.

It's possible some within the corporation imagine that, with the federal government suddenly awash in funds, they might yet be rescued by fresh infusions of public subsidy, that the past few years of cutbacks and layoffs will prove to have been a bad dream from which they will soon awake. But all the money in the world is not going to bring back the audience -- not just the thousands driven away during the strike, many of them never to return, but the permanent, ongoing decline in the CBC's share of the broadcast market. As it is, the CBC's English TV service pulls less than 10% of the viewers in prime time. Is it likely that the government will spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on the corporation as that ratio dwindles to 5%, and 2%, and beyond?

That's not a comment on the quality of the CBC's offerings -- well, it might be, though CBC television, at least, seems, if anything, to have improved since the cuts. It's simply a technological fact of life, one that every network, not just the CBC, is having to face.

More and more channels translates into smaller and smaller shares of the television audience, itself fast losing ground to video, CD-ROMs and the Internet. Whatever your view of the CBC or public television, it makes little sense, amid a constellation of possible viewing choices, to throw so much public funding at one point on the dial.

The good news is that the same technological developments that have made the CBC obsolete also make it unnecessary. There was a case for public television when there were so few choices on offer, even more so given the absolute dependence of private television in those days on advertising as a source of revenues, which guaranteed that programming would be dictated not, as in most markets, by the diverse and discriminating tastes that paying customers usually display, but by the number of people who could be persuaded to glance at a given show at least part of the time. Since advertisers paid, and viewers didn't, the business was one of selling audiences to advertisers, rather than programs to viewers.

That was then. Today, satellites and digital transmission herald the end of spectrum scarcity, while pay TV and pay-per-view have made possible much more specialized and demanding programs -- a phenomenon soon to be replicated on radio. The case for public broadcasting has disappeared or, at any rate, is in for some serious revision. Perhaps the CBC and its employees would rather not think about that. But the rest of us might.