Time is an increasingly valuable commodity these days, particularly with all the activities competing for our attention. With television viewers averaging nearly three and one quarter hours viewing each day on top of the increasing demands on our time made by work, often intruding into traditional leisure hours, our days are becoming very full indeed. And if your business is providing those activities then it's becoming a much harder task to get people to spend their time - and money - on new distractions, er..., attractions.

Players in the media and entertainment business wonder if there's extra time in the day to be found for us to spend more on different kinds of information and entertainment services, like pay television, theme parks and interactive on-line services delivered by computers. Just in case there isn't, some are also investigating if there's extra value to be extracted from the part of our lives we already spend on these pastimes.

While the nine channel Galaxy service concentrates on "adding value" to well-known forms of television, especially movies, news and sport, Foxtel, and its rival, Optus Vision, are following a double strategy of also developing completely new forms of television. This new television is like a menu of services to select from only when you want something - "on demand". No longer would we have to wait for someone else's program on the schedule or follow someone else's taste - we could make our own personalised daily, weekly or monthly schedule in advance.

Chris Vonviller, the then head of Telstra Multimedia, at a conference of new media producers held this month in Adelaide, spoke of developing new "broad, mid and narrowband" services to complement the more familiar forms of television on pay services. Telstra, and their Foxtel partner, Fox/News Limited, are concentrating on electronic banking, education, real estate and other services, due next year. This would save us time because we would select only the exact service required, precisely when we wanted it. Optus Vision is also planning similar new ideas.

If these alternative television services are successful, they might provide the missing piece of the puzzle for the long term success of pay services in the relatively small, but information- and entertainment-hungry, Australian market. Indeed, the business plans of these new pay ventures see ordinary television channels as merely a "loss leader", or loss-making attraction, to bring subscribers to these new, on-demand services where, hopefully, the real profits lie.

Overseas viewers adapted to the opening of pay television and dozens of new channels with only a small increase in the time spent watching programs, and we will likely do the same here. So the future revenue of the industry will have to come from offering us a more efficient and better use of our valuable time. And for this we might just be prepared to pay a little more.