You still have to physically deliver the tapes or the xeroxed copies. Digital technology and the Internet combined When you combine digital technologies with the Internet, you reduce both the cost of reproduction and the cost of distribution. Making downloadable materials available online automatically delivers them to anyone with access to the site. This changes a crucial characteristic of the economics of communication. Until the Internet, communicating information involved a trade-off between richness and reach .
Richness is a function of the amount of relevant information.
The more relevant information, the more information rich the communication. To illustrate the traditional inverse relationship, imagine a magazine advertisement for a new network server. It would, for example, almost certainly be inadvisable to present highly technical information relevant to a network administrator who would maintain the server. Most readers would find the information neither relevant nor fully comprehensible. The solution is to limit richness by including a relatively small amount of general information relevant to a large number of readers.