This Edinburgh Interational TV Festival started out, quite understandably, with a great deal of self-flagellating worriment about just how much viewer trust has been lost in television. Fortunately after a bit of mutual beating cooler and wiser discussion prevailed: it is no longer satisfactory for executives to fall into the trap encountered by frazzled News 24 or Sky News producers of lumping offence (Celebrity Big Brother) in with trust (Ramsay's lack of fish), and offence and trust in with incompetence (You Say We Pay). Each is its own issue and each demands its own set of solutions.

Those solutions can be found with relative ease: editorial procedures that look good on paper need to be implemented, and corporate structures altered to ensure quick lines of reporting to people who can be easily identified as having responsibility.

Late in the first day of the festival it became clear that the gathering of executives, programme makers and journalists would have to grapple with far more serious, long-term, structural questions: we're now well over half a decade into the 21st Century, and people are consuming media in ways not dreamed of 10 years ago. What does television mean, what should it do, who should it serve, and should the peculiarly British concept of public broadcasting continue to exist in a smaller world marketplace?

One undoubtedly well-meaning attempt to deal with those questions ended up with Google chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf giving the Alternative MacTaggart, a snoozefest with a total lack of usable insight into the future of British television. It fell into the trap of considering the mode of delivery rather than what is actually being delivered - a position wisely highlighted by Paxman's non-alt speech.

The questions were indeed better dealt with by Paxman, whose MacTaggart will in coming years be revered as a moment when the platform was used not to score petty points against other broadcasters (Allen) or the British way of broadcasting (Murdoch), but instead to deliver a series of prescient questions designed to provoke intelligent debate among gathered delegates. It is after all far easier to carp and complain than to deliver a positive speech designed to kick people up their backsides and motivate them to find answers.

Paxman's address, delivered with the expected but suitable panache in which a friendly but firm kick up the collective rear was contained, was a call to action. There are answers to these very serious questions but the broadcasting industry is playing catch-up in the treasure hunt for clues. As discussions progressed in smaller sessions, and particularly in the controller interviews, it became clear that the search has now begun in earnest. Roly Keating at BBC Two and Julian Bellamy at Channel 4 in particular are grappling with how to deliver sharp-edged public service television while keeping budgets down and - in Bellamy's case - coping with a projected £100m shortfall post-switchover and the possible privatisation of his channel. ITV1 is facing the decision of whether to abandon its public service obligations completely as soon as Ofcom lets it, or whether to continue on the peculiarly British PSB lines it has barrelled along, with admittedly varying degrees of success, for over 50 years. The BBC as a whole faces strikingly fundamental problems: the relevance of a licence fee relative to diversifying content delivery mechanisms; the provision of PSB content on a very tight budgeting process while being forced for political reasons to spend money building media centres up north; and a cultural issue of desperately chasing the "yoof" market with dumbed-down programming (and yes, that's what it is even if it's branded "accessible") in an increasingly flailing attempt to remain relevant.

These problems do not have easy solutions. There are no paper procedures that simply need to be properly implemented. Instead, what needs to happen now is for broadcasters to properly use new methods of engaging with the public to discover a constructive way forward.

For example, broadcasters, it's easy to use video upload facilities to get cheap UGC for news programmes. It's not, however, particularly original. But how about using the technology to get views from people who love making video but probably aren't going to sit down with a pen and write a letter? That might be a good way of "reaching" the youth market who really couldn't give a damn, by the way, about using the red button. How about using meetup.com or Facebook to organise forums where you can meet people who probably have quite a lot to say about what they expect from TV? Yes, you'll get people unable to string together constructive arguments and hold up "no to the licence fee" signs, but you'll also meet people with valid and probably quite well-developed ideas who would value the opportunity to discuss them with you. There's a fairly big festival that takes place in Edinburgh once a year that could probably include such sessions.

And, as Paxman suggested, now is the time for us - and by us, I include the British public as a whole - to determine what we expect from public service broadcasting. It may be a very un-British thing to do - codifying ideas didn't really catch on as an idea for the constitution and it won't work for something as fast moving as TV - but the discussion needs to begin. It needs to begin right now so that at next year's Festival, discussions will be able to include not only endless questions, but some answers too - hopefully making the Festival even more exciting and useful than this year's catharsis has been.