Media is not an industry that is known for being polite or even civil to the Tories at times, but Jeremy Hunt made a strong showing at The Media Festival in Manchester last week. This may be as much to do with the rather sensible line that he has been taking, as the lack of any substantive vision or policy from the current government - contrast the innovative, short and sharp-thinking paper on local media companies that Roger Parry produced for Mr Hunt with Lord Carter's stale, turgid and rather lengthy Digital Britain report - very much a product of Labour's over-regulatory approach.

Mr Hunt started with an observation that is highly apparent to those of us who work in technology, but not apparently by media policy makers, namely that the media industry is the technology industry. Whereas Ofcom in the past has wrangled with the issues of new technology platforms and how to extend media regulation, Mr Hunt's point is the opposite - extend the regulatory approaches in the technology industry into media, not the other way around. The implication is that media regulation should be light touch and reward innovation, which is not characteristic of the current regulator (particularly if you are BSkyB). This has got to be good news for the industry, as it means greater freedom to operate, with commercially mind people making decisions based on consumer behaviour.

Extending deregulation further into local media markets not only makes sense but may be the only sustainable way of allowing commercial operations to continue to exist (and even grow) without the need for any public funding. It is depressing to witness the clamour to feed off the public teat for the new Independently Financed News Consortia (IFNC), so if deregulation can provide stronger independent commercial news (and entertainment) consortia, then there is some hope.

Mr Hunt maintained his strong opposition to top-slicing, although I can't help thinking that it would be better to be upfront about opposition to top slicing - if you top slice and spread public funding even further it will be impossible to ever get rid of the licence fee, and worse, you may end up having to increase it to support the new wave of public funding addicts. Personally I am in favour of the licence fee, but believe that top slicing will forever kill off any future informed discussion of it.

There were two ideas that did not seem as fully thought through, though. Firstly, the idea of using terrestrial frequency to support 80 local TV stations seems completely at odds with where technology is going. TV production and transmission costs remain high, and the danger of local TV attempting to mimic (unsuccessfully) the services from larger national or regional TV is ever present . Moreover there is already a much better mechanism for delivering local services - the web and web TV in particular. I'd like to know a lot more about my neighbourhood but that would be considerably easier to do with a web based service where I can choose when and where to access that information, rather than some new terrestrial station that I need to switch away from my Sky+ box to find.

Secondly, Mr Hunt backed some protectionism against the import of foreign programming. He cited cultural reasons and then offered X-Factor as an example of why this is a good idea (as opposed to Dallas and Hart to Hart from our youth - or some of our youths). Somewhat amazingly this did not produce any sniggering from the audience which I think rather sadly shows just how much X-Factor has entered the nation's soul. The argument seems absurd on a number of levels - firstly X-Factor would succeed regardless of any programming import restrictions, because as a rule the most popular programming is always domestic. While some of us may think that The Wire beats just about any domestic drama on the BBC or ITV, and Family Guy is funnier than My Family, BARB ratings show that the majority of the viewing public believe otherwise. But the second reason is more compelling, particularly for people who believe in free markets - competition is good. In the same way that ITV and BBC competition produces stronger programming on both, high quality imports from the US must keep the creative bar high for UK TV production.

But these are relatively minor issues. I think like many at The Media Festival, I was left with a feeling that a fresher, more innovative and less bureaucratic media environment would be possible with Mr Hunt running DCMS.