One of the effects of $200-a-barrel oil will be that anything that can possibly be transported electronically will be. Trends in that direction will accelerate as companies try to cut shipping costs. So expect devices like the Roku Netflix Player, which lets you choose Netflix films and download them directly to your television, to become a whole lot more popular. It never made much sense to tuck discs containing digital information into an envelope, load the envelopes into a truck, send the trucks to a central distribution center, rout the envelopes all across the country, load them back into trucks, deliver them to homes, and then start the whole process in reverse. But energy was cheap and broadband was slow and so that's basically what we've been doing. Downloading movies was always going to triumph eventually, but the rising costs of shipping a disc or driving to Blockbuster will hasten that transition considerably.
