Present Tense:If you missed this week's episode of Prosperity - and feel that the combination of soccer, rugby and tribunals haven't depressed your spirit enough - then you could catch up with it again, any time you wanted over the last few days, writes Shane Hegarty.
You could watch the opening episode, read the scripts or watch the director interview one of the lead actors. You could do this because, while RTÉ struggles on in the hope of getting some recognition for what it does on the small screen, what it's doing on an even smaller screen is quietly impressive.
As with newspapers, television finds itself at a moment when it must decide if it wants to fight the internet, its biggest threat, or embrace it. RTÉ, like most of the British channels, is hugging it close.
Its problem is that it doesn't yet know how it will end. Because in piping some of its biggest shows through a computer screen, it poses increasingly difficult questions about what constitutes television - and whether we should be expected to pay a licence fee for it.
Recently, Vint Cerf, one of the internet's early innovators and now a vice-president of Google, caused a minor stir when pronouncing the impending death of television as we know it. Most of it, he pointed out, is pre-recorded, so why be told when to watch it?
"You're still going to need live television for certain things - like news, sporting events and emergencies - but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later." Television's "iPod moment" is still a little way off.
The picture quality delivered by the internet isn't good enough yet, broadband roll-out isn't complete, computer screens don't match up to 40-inch mini-cinemas perched over the mantelpiece where the family portrait used to be. Although there is an ominous portent in the way iPod users have, almost without question, accepted a decline in the quality of sound so that they can take 5,000 songs on the train.
But television's tipping point draws closer. And it's being helped by the innovations of the TV channels that are themselves most under threat. They are the Neanderthals long before they were wiped out, still hopeful of a future but helping Homo sapiens build their huts, while also showing them how to hunt.
So, the past year has seen a flurry of activity among the British channels. ITV's recently updated site streams programmes, new and old, so that the viewer can watch on screen but cannot stop or fast-forward them. The BBC's iPlayer, on the other hand, sends the user the programmes, which can be watched when and how the viewer wants until the service expires after a 30-day limit. Channel 4's service also allows viewers download programmes, charging for movies and anything more than a week old.
Creating new revenue streams out of this revolution is a massive headache. There is a limit to the number of ads that can be run before an online download, and, as the technology develops, viewers will be required to see less and less of them anyway. There is a certain irony in the fact that the most talked-about television commercial of the moment - Cadbury's drumming gorilla - has become a viral hit. The future of television advertising looks just as caught in the web.
But RTÉ and the BBC have a more fundamental problem: the licence fee. What is the point of a television licence fee when there is increasingly less requirement for people to own a television? What happens when a box underneath the television takes signals not from cable or satellite, but from broadband?
What happens when the plasma TV is replaced with a large computer screen? RTÉ is aware of this problem, with warnings about the changing nature of the "box in the corner" aired at Oireachtas hearings on broadcasting legislation early this year. Meanwhile, the British regulatory body, Ofcom, this week announced it is to look into the nature of public service broadcasting and whether it should be limited to traditional media.
On the surface, RTÉ's response - that 99 per cent of homes have a television, so the licence fee must stay as it is - might look evasive. But its subtle online strategy suggests otherwise. It has become the leading website in the country, offering bonus content and dispensing with the need for schedules. Through this, it is mimicking, to an extent, the BBC's success, despite early suggestions that taxpayers' money should not be wasted on HTML.
RTÉ, for once, is playing the long game, gradually bringing in features, with little fanfare, little fuss. It is making itself a sturdy safety net for when traditional television is eventually toppled.