Well, a lot of “broadcast tv” has already been replaced, by cable. I have no idea what the percentage of TVs get their signal via cable rather than antennae, but it’s got to be a pretty big majority.
But no, I don’t think that NBC is going to be going off the air any time soon. 
Hell, I’ve been left behind already. I’m still stuck with dialup. :sad:
There will always be a place for broadcast TV for news, live sports premiers of TV shows and other events in which timeliness matters. But for ordinary content, the advantages of on-demand are just too compelling. A significant proportion of Australians are doing media on demand NOW albeit through illegal channels. The figures many people are tossing around are for MPEG2 or equivilant encoding. Using more advanced codecs can drastically reduce the bandwidth. For a standard xvid compressed SDTV show, it works out to be about 140KB/s or so to stream real time or 1Mbps. This is easily achievable using current, P2P infrastructure.
Not have anything faster than DSL includes everything at DSL speed and below. So anything from dial-up to the fastest DSL.
It is now possible to legally download The Office. Thats the US version, also they are specially produced mini-episodes.
You’re right, I mis-read what he was saying. But thinking more about it I find it odd.
He’s lumping together DSL, dial-up and people who have no internet connection at all?
So 40% of the US home will have cable or fiber optic. Maybe another 30% for DSL. That’s going to be something like 75 million households with broadband. He seems to be arguing against the notion of TV being replaced by downloading and concluding therefore that no one is going to be downloading shows.
In seven years, will NBC, ABC and Fox be out of business because everyone’s now downloading everything? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be a sizable percentage of TV watchers who download all or part of the shows they watch.
A couple of articles of interest…
Yeah, there ain’t no future about it.
Almost all of my students have iPods and the like. I polled my high school classes on how many of them had been to a record store in the past year to buy music for themselves. Out of about 40 students, three raised their hands, and even those said they had gone only once.