I was talking to a friend the other day who is a regular television presenter for several programmes. He tells me that senior executives are now uncertain what television will even look like beyond 2000, let alone what sort or programmes people will want to watch once they have 500 or more channels to chose from - not including a billion internet pages and tens of thousands of internet videos to connect to. Video-rental shops on street corners are likely to take a real hammering and many will go out of business unless they find a new product by 1999. It may turn out to be something like ultra-high resolution interactive CDs, containing such vast amounts of interactive television and animations that even a cable system cannot compete. I doubt it somehow.
Cable has huge untapped capacity, even without new systems to compress television transmission.
However there will probably always be a market for hiring bits and pieces that are too expensive for people to buy. An example might be virtual reality headsets and gloves, allowing the user to see and feel a virtual world. A shop might hire out a set of four so that a whole family could go into a virtual world together, seeing each other and interacting not only with the others there but also with users in other cities or nations. An example might be a virtual reality area which is free to join but which contains high profile adverts for a number of different products and services. Advertising works on the knowledge that the average net user looks at two hundred pages a month, and many of them are in upper income groups.