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Has a musical ever been so well promoted as the upcoming production of The Sound of Music? Having lost his planned Hollywood star lead of Scarlett Johansson, rather than wallow in self-pity, he dreamed up a BBC audition to do his work for him and is now getting oodles of free publicity.

It is the sort of publicity that money literally cannot buy. The result? £6m in advance takings at the box office.

Indeed, all the numbers are impressive here. The audience for Saturday night's final of How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? averaged 7.7m, with more than 2m viewers paying to vote.

From an advertising point of view, the only sadness is that the show was on the BBC and not on commercial television. You can be sure that Strictly Come Dancing will also attract a big and broad family audience of the sort ITV can only dream about.

As for his Lordship, he should be given an advertising effectiveness award without any further delay.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? may also have had an important medicinal effect on the television industry. It provided proof positive that, with a little bit of imagination, and perhaps a little bit of luck, it is possible to grab the attention of a decent proportion of the fragmenting audience on Saturday nights. This is a trick that should really not be totally beyond the reach of ITV commissioning editors.

The Maria pick-me-up came at just the right time for the television industry, two days after everyone in it had frightened themselves to death again at the Royal Television Society conference.

The latest nightmare is the result of the growing success of the vast DIY media battalions, such as You-Tube and MySpace.

YouTube, it emerged last week, is the fastest-growing online brand in the UK, having posted growth of more than 500% in the past six months.

There was a startling moment at the conference when the industry's great and good were shown an online clip of two very ordinary teenagers in China miming to a pop song in their bedrooms. The audience was asked how many had seen it before and at least half put up their hands.

Some may have been lying, of course, just to appear hip and knowledgeable, while others may have been researching the new enemy. But it was still an impressive showing, despite my overwhelming desire to ask why anyone would want to watch such a thing.

Attendees were also shown a clip of Lonelygirl15, a young girl explaining to a camera in her bedroom how dull her life is - a saga that has attracted more than half a million visits. That example at least has been exposed as a fraud; Lonelygirl15 is an actress and the performance was orchestrated by a talent agency.

If more and more people are going to spend their time watching DIY television - an output that includes Arctic Monkeys - then the only rational response of marketers is to follow the eyeballs.

That leaves a serious worry that some of the ad revenue that traditionally funded commercial broadcasting may never come back. How do you solve a problem like that?

This is why you need singers such as Connie Fisher from Pembrokeshire to cheer everybody up.

30 SECONDS ON ... ROYAL TELEVISION SOCIETY CONFERENCE

- Speakers at this year's RTS London Conference, which took place on 14 September, included outgoing ITV chief executive Charles Allen, culture secretary Tessa Jowell, Channel 4 chief executive Andy Duncan, BSkyB chief executive James Murdoch and BBC director-general Mark Thompson.

- Jowell unveiled a report revealing that the public want more BBC services to be funded by subscription rather than the licence fee. 'They want more control over what services they receive,' she said.

- BSkyB's Murdoch said he was relishing the chance of taking on its rivals in the broadband and voice markets, but warned that BT would find itself 'in a scary place' if it tried to undercut Sky's pay-TV service.

- C4's Duncan warned that TV ad revenues were likely to fall 6%-7% this year. He added that the broadcaster is 'more vulnerable than people realise' because it does not own its content and could face a funding gap of more than £100m a year.