If BBC One, Two, ITV, CH4 & Ch5 all broadcast high quality programmes all the time, then I would agree that everyone would probably just sit down in front of their tellies and never even think of words like Netflix, or boxsets again. But in the real world that's not the case.
The other day, a few people quipped when I said that 7 million viewers still watch depressing crap like Eastenders at Christmas as evidence than an all linear world is as strong as ever. There are over 60 million people in this country.... most are choosing not to waste their lives with this rubbish being served up like cold turkey by the broadcasters.
I think this is as much, if not more, a discussion about the quality of tv, rather than whether it be linear, non-linear, streamed or whatever. As long as you can still watch something on the box, most people won't care whether it's broadcast, streamed etc.
If the world were to stay all linear, then I'd agree with Chris that the traditional broadcast model is the way to go. But it's not and another major factor today is mobile. People are consuming content on various devices and in various places. Some of this is linear, traditional tv channels. But many of it is not.
I won't even go into the "mad" professor's arguments in that article, he is mixing together and confusing power consumption with bandwidth.
But on the subject of bandwidth, I present to you one word "multicast", sounds sexy, doesn't it?
On cable at least, VM will eventually go down the multicast route, meaning everything will become streamed aka video on demand (VOD) including linear "broadcast" channels, except they won't be broadcast.... they'll be VOD streams instead.
There will come a point soon when all the big media companies and telcos decide how they are going to deliver content to consumers in an increasingly non-linear world. It will be the mother of all bust ups, and we've already seen early rounds of fighting between them in recent years, especially in America.
As I've said before, I think we'll end up with a small core group of linear channels, but everything, at least on cable, will become VOD.
The delivery methods will all merge. So you may be watching a show on a mobile device while walking home and transfer your watching of that show or "channel" to your main tv when you get home. It is quite possible that to have watched that show it may have been delivered to you (or broadcast) using several different methods, but you won't notice any difference.
The change will be that linear and non-linear watching of tv will become so seamless, you will not notice whether it's a "proper" channel or not.