Broadcasting. Or radio and TV. Oddly almost all radio stations are available on the internet, but yet huge amounts of radio spectrum are still used, and governments still promote more regionalism in stations. TV on the other hand uses the internet very little as its main delivery channel. Many have tried to change this, but seem to come up against commercial and rights issues which prevent its adoption. This is frankly all a bit crazy and some heads ned knocking together. Releasing UHF frequencies from TV delivery to wireless internet would have overwhelming consequences for us all. There is no future in terrestrial TV delivery and it should due abandoned in favour of satellite only delivery.
Discs/Tapes. These are dead, or hopefully dying. Again here, like broadcasting there is a big difference between audio and video. The audio CD is and will be quickly replaced by digital internet delivery. But the DVD, more under the tight control of rights owners, is still very much alive. There is some truth in the argument that the current poor bandwidth of most country's internet means that it is not yet ready to deliver DVD content.
Film. This is today completely obsolete, except for a few cinemas. The delivery of films to cinemas is now on digital HDDs.
Publishing. Both paper and electronic publishing, in the form of web pages or PDF files is co-surviving, with the economic model for paper becoming more and more unviable as the cost of internet delivery falls. Internet delivery costs are now paid by customers to the service providers almost 100%, and the publishers get nothing, whereas for a physical paper the corner shop got its share and the paper got the rest. But the game is almost over for papers, they simply need to make the last step to electronic only delivery and find a way to monetize it… they were probably utterly foolish to ever get into delivering free news in the first place! Maybe solutions like Zinio and Apple's new newspaper/magazine publishing solutions will swing the tide? But here there are 3 players, a percentage to the software provider (Zinio and Apple), a percentage to the payment portal (Apple) and the rest to the publisher. Only time will tell if these percentages are right.
VIdeo Games. Not everyone plays games, but those that do have a wide choice of gaming platforms which use disc delivery and internet delivery and interaction. This is a symbiotic market where the disc serves to protect IP and the internet provides interaction. It is unlikely that the discs will fade away until IP can be 100% protected on internet file deliveries.
Everything points to the internet!
So as you can see everything points to internet delivery. There are just two issues which have to be strengthened:1 Protection of IP
2 Bandwidth
Protecting IP can be done with encryption, but only if the buyer and seller can be identified without any chance of fraud or impersonation. This needs certification of providers, already done through security certificates, and ID of individuals. This is a very contentious issue which Joe Blogs seems to resent. He is crazy, the benefits to everyone would be huge if we could uniquely electronically ID ourselves. We do it for our Visa cards, and PIN numbers. Why not for internet access and encrypted delivery. Beats me!!! I would like to just plug my smart Visa card into my PC and be uniquely ID'ed. (Of course that requires a revolution in the USA where they don't use smartcards… maybe that's the reason?)
Bandwidth is simply a matter of investment. Which in the end comes down to politics and government and lobby groups. I fail to see why we would be willing to spend £32bn on a new high speed train, in other words just to re-invent the victorian mousetrap, when we are spending just £0.5bn on broadband which could lead to so many improvements in all our society.
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