They are the young guns tuned in to the accelerating pace of change in the media landscape - the trendspotters and entrepreneurs who stand to reap the biggest rewards over the next digital decade.

We present our list of “40 under 40” people from the media industry in its broadest sense - embracing broadcasting, computer games, venture capital and mobile technology. Most are up and coming; some have already made it. What unites them is that they are responding to the changing way in which the public uses the media and, in an age in which the internet is flooding the market with free content, figuring out how to make it pay.

The consumer is getting choosier. In Sky+ homes, for example, 17% of programmes are now “timeshifted” - or watched from the hard drive instead of when broadcasters decide to transmit them.

Internet advertising is forecast to be worth £3.4 billion in Britain this year, according to Group M. That figure is approaching 20% of all advertising spending and is closing in fast on the television industry’s total.

Our selection process was wholly unscientific. Some of the established names are not here and we tried to limit ourselves to one person per company. We were looking for a strong mix of candidates who have got people talking. Some sit in the upper echelons of the biggest media and communications organisations in Britain. Others run tiny start-ups. All have digital media at the heart of their business. Report by James Ashton and Kate Walsh

Suranga Chandratillake, 30

Chief executive of Blinkx

The Sri Lankan-born Suranga Chandratillake spun out Blinkx, his video search system, from the Cambridge data sorting firm Autonomy last year and floated it on the Alternative Investment Market. Chandratillake spotted that the trend in internet searches was shifting from text to video and audio. Blinkx makes money by taking a small slice of advertising income from the likes of Reuters and ITN for pointing internet users towards their websites. Some 18.5m hours of video are indexed. But Chandratillake will have to work harder to convince investors of his vision. Blinkx’s share price has fallen by two-thirds.

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