For the RBS Six Nations Championship, read the USS Enterprise. This weekend, the championship boldly goes for a Friday night kick-off.

Whether Wales fans will be able to boldly go to Paris for a 9pm start is open to considerable doubt.

Of course, television's to blame. The broadcasters want to get as much bang for their bucks as possible and, given that as the competition gets ever more attractive they are forced to bid ever greater sums to cover it, they are gambling that a prime-time kick-off might produce an audience of prime-time proportions and help to recoup some of their investment.

But the traditionalists who have rushed to criticise the television companies for what they see as disregard for the rights of the paying public, are barking up the wrong tree.

For the broadcasters, the paying public are not to be found at the stadium but in the living-room. They need a big crowd at a stadium to provide the right sort of back-drop, make the right sort of noise and create the sort of atmosphere that can inspire the protagonists to great exploits, but they are far more concerned about the silent majority who are much more likely to close the curtains, pull up a chair and settle down to watch the action from the comfort of their own living-rooms.

These are the millions who matter most and they provide the millions that bankroll the international game.

And suggestions that Wales fans should vote with their feet and boycott the match in Paris are as laughable as they are self-defeating. Their places would not be left vacant but would almost inevitably be filled by home fans, thereby making Stade de France even more inhospitable to the Wales team.

And if they didn't travel, Welsh fans would only be able to follow their team by switching on their televisions – and would thereby play still further into the hands of broadcasters, who judge success almost entirely by the size of their audience.

While modern rugby life seems to bear out the old adage that he who pays the piper calls the tune, the game must still be careful not to allow the broadcasters to encroach too far.

Referees, in my opinion, can never be replaced by technology and I'm not so sure that the loudly trumpeted new technology they employ now does not create as many problems as it solves.

The age old dictum that "the referee is always right- even when he's wrong" has taken a battering of late, as television has appropriated the mantle of infallibility for itself. How often do we hear "that was never a try" or "that was definitely a forward pass" or "so-and-so was definitely offside" from TV pundits who base their certainty on evidence produced by the cameras?

Yet the cameras are in fixed positions and can therefore only provide an angle of view, and a depth of field in relation to their position and not in relation to the pitch; judgements on what is straight or what is offside are necessarily subjective, based on the viewer's interpretation of evidence provided by the camera.

This evidence may be more comprehensive than that gathered in the heat of the moment by a referee at pitch level, with only one pair of eyes without the benefit of an action replay, but it is still not the complete picture.

And the camera is not as absolutely trustworthy as the television directors claim. I read with interest of a recent experiment in Australian cricket that showed that depth of field was so compressed by the most powerful cameras that some slip catches which were taken cleanly by the fielder, and acknowledged as having "carried" by the batsman, appeared on the television screens to have hit the ground. I It's a simple rule of thumb that the more camera angles there are to consider, the more time it takes to reach a decision.

The more time players spend hanging about waiting for a judgment from the video referee, the less impressive are the claims about how long the ball spends in play.

And the longer the wait, the less chance of the game finishing at the time that the TV companies are almost literally banking on. And we wouldn't want that would we?