THE media is an industry besotted with obscure acronyms, and the one currently terrorising the beleaguered strategists of linear television is FAANGs – a term that has become sinister shorthand for the US tech giants Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google.

Last week the BBC’s director general Lord Tony Hall voiced concern that the future of terrestrial television is imperilled by the unrestrained growth of the FAANGs. Along with Channel 4 the BBC is demanding that legislators intervene to bring a new equilibrium to the media marketplace.

Hall has a very powerful case, but it may be that the horse has already bolted and all that regulator Ofcom can do is as constraining as a creaking stable door.

The internet has disrupted conventional businesses across almost every industry, and when it comes to television the pervasiveness of the FAANGs are now routinely embedded in our lives. The dream of un-inventing Facebook and Amazon is nothing more than hopelessly romantic Luddism.

These new services and the digital sorcery that underpins them are not going away. Much as we may cherish the past and its hoary simplicity, we seem powerless as a society to impose fairer taxation on the globally nimble web-giants. Nor is there a clear path to regulating their worst intrusions into our life: fake news, online abuse and scandalous working conditions within the gig economy.

The term FAANG was invented by the American stock-exchange analyst Jim Cramer, a former hedge-fund manager turned TV star who regularly appears on CNBC’s show Mad Money. Cramer has that gushing self-belief so admired in American business – not quite a snake-oil salesman, more a college coach bursting with motivational energy.

Cramer loves an acronym and in this case I bow to his clever allusion – a fang is normally associated in my mind with vampires and venomous snakes – an uncannily clever tilt at the bloodsucking powers of the new media giants.

In their battle with the FAANGs, the BBC have argued for a “level playing field” to curb the growth of the US giants. One area causing genuine anxiety is a long-standing cornerstone of British broadcasting: public service broadcasting prominence – better known by its industry-wide acronym, PSB.

The joint campaign to safeguard public service prominence is a pressing issue for the traditional broadcasters. Alex Mahon of Channel 4, who grew up in Edinburgh’s Newington, has argued that by 2020, the majority of viewing by people aged under 35 is expected to be on-demand and that legacy television will already be in steep decline.

Since the advent of television, the public service broadcasters have enjoyed prominence in our lives. The first channels broadcast in the days of so-called spectrum scarcity – BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4 – secured public prominence. To this day these are buttons one, two, three and four on our devices.

These channels are hard-wired into our minds and the ubiquitous “doofer” that rested on a table, sat perilously on an armchair or got lost down the backs of settees in homes across Scotland is now a familiar front-room device.

Then along came an organisation called Hillcrest Labs, who have their corporate headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. They have no great interest in the quaint concept of public service prominence. What they do care about is robotics, sensor intelligence and smart consumerism. Hillcrest Labs is already finessing the “doofers” of the future, remote control wands which work magic with a flick of the wrist.

Back in 2008, Hillcrest hosted a secret meeting with LG, the South Korean components company and global pioneers of smart TVs.

Hillcrest unveiled a specification for the remote controls for all LG televisions at a time when the Korean company was expanding aggressively. With the slogan “Life’s Good”, LG came to be a powerful force in the future of television, and inadvertently a threat to the BBC’s new Scotland channel.

In homes that have older remote controls there is still clear value in public service prominence.

The Gaelic language channel BBC Alba is at number 7, and so highly prominent in simple search. American stations such as CBS Reality are much further down at button 66, Sky News at 233 and – should you ever need to know – Babe Station is at a lowly number 674, lurking in the hinterlands of television like a flaccid penis.

THE new channel That’s TV Scotland has been gifted prominence. It will be button number 8, and so, even in multi-channel homes, it stands a very good chance of being watched. There are roughly 190 channels available to most household. Routinely people watch up to 17 but with a clear preference for around eight key channels. The new BBC Scotland channel must aim to become one of those eight channels among Scottish viewers to succeed.

In their deliberations with LG, Hillcrest Labs saw a glaring market opportunity. Rather than abide by the established conventions of the numerical channels, they offered smart-button prominence that bypasses the numeric system, taking the viewer online, and thus entirely stepping past BBC1 and Channel 4 and going directly to on-demand services via the internet.

It was no great surprise when the two magic buttons were snapped up by the behemoths of on-demand, Netflix and Amazon Prime.

I am not yet completely sold on Netflix. So far, I’ve gorged on Narcos although the actor playing Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar was suspiciously like my maths teacher at Perth Academy, and with much the same contempt for human life.

Nor can I honestly say I am any closer to understanding who killed Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur – although the LAPD are not off the hook just yet.

That’s it. Two shows and not much more. I am not one of the thousands of zealous converts that arrange their life around binge-viewing, box sets and stacking-up the weekend.

Amazon Prime is even less appealing. Other than stored music and a few movies, we barely use it at home, although fair play to the wee-man – he’s only turned six and has already sussed he can watch Pingu on demand, whilst his middle-class mum goes full-on Kirstie Allsopp, smashing iPads in the kitchen.

Hillcrest’s next generation wands present a near insurmountable problem for the regulator Ofcom.

Ofcom do not regulate the internet, nor do they have great sway over South Korean manufacturers or innovative robotic technology companies either. That said, nor can they sit idly by and watch one of the central pillars of British public service broadcasting be bypassed, undermined and systemically devalued.

Mahon has argued persuasively that public service broadcasting content should have a “protected prominent position” for a viewer on any device – on set top boxes, streaming sticks, smart TVs and even games consoles.

That is an ambitious plea and one that would need new regulation, something that is highly unlikely in an era when a deeply dysfunctional Tory government in London rips itself apart over Brexit.

One of the catastrophic problems with Brexit is that it has over-determined the parliamentary process.

It is the big show and the noises off. We live in times when the breakthrough hit at Netflix, House of Cards, may need to be remade yet again, this time set in a dormitory in Eton where an unlovable gang of public school boys plot and scheme over who gets to overthrow nanny and run the tuck shop themselves

I live in hope that Scotland finds a way to bypass that particular narrative.

Stuart Cosgrove is a writer and broadcaster. The latest instalment of his award-winning Soul Trilogy - ‘Harlem 69: The Future of Soul’ will be published by Polygon in October.