Being a celebrity is going to be harder, if for no other reason than that your privacy is more invadable. Moreover, the kinds of celebrities are going to change. I think we're moving toward the end of the age of the Schwarzenegger/Willis celebrity. I say that because of the way they're going to work in the future, given the application of these new technologies to Hollywood. So instead of saying, "Arnold, we're going to shoot a movie and it's going to take six months, and we want you to go to lower Slobovia and do the following things," they're going to say, "Arnold, come in on Saturday morning, and we're going to need about three hours of your time. We want you to sit in the chair, stand up, extend a leg, make a smile, raise your fist, and go home." The computer will interpolate all the other motions, and it will look exactly like Schwarzenegger.

We'll also have virtual celebrities. Remember our old friend Max Headroom? I think Max Headroom was a primitive incipient version of characters who will, in fact, be crafted by computer but will look like people and will take on the role that actors and actresses do in soap operas and in other dramatic forms. They will not look jerky and cartoonlike as Max Headroom did. They'll look terrific. In fact, they'll look so terrific that their faces will be exactly what you think is beautiful and not necessarily what your neighbour thinks, because they'll be customised for each home.

The other thing about them is they will be sponsored by Nike, or somebody like that. Given the full potential of broadband, why can't you do that? Why can't you create a face or a character? I think the leading soap operas will be made up of casts of virtual actors and actresses. I suggest there will be a lot of jobs for people who design.

Games: The play's the thing
Paul Matteucci: There are two basic groups of game players, we call them avid players, or "gamers", and casual game players. In the gamer category, Mplayer.com has a variety of games like action games and simulations, such as US Navy Fighters, and strategy games, which are not very action-oriented, such as Risk or Panzer General. Sports is a huge category for online games; games like basketball, hockey, and golf are the most popular sports games because they're the easiest to play online.Then there are the classic games for the more casual game player.

Mplayer.com offers games like free poker, spades, bingo, checkers, chess; board games like Scrabble and Battleship; and crossword puzzles and triva. Other sites offer game shows like Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. Some of the most popular games in our service are the classic games, primarily poker, spades, checkers.

There are many more casual game players on the Internet than gamers, and about 43 per cent of that audience is female. On some sites, like Gamesville, where bingo's the biggest game, there is an even higher percentage of women. This audience is generally older than the gamer audience, averaging in their upper forties to early fifties. The sweet spot for the gamer audience is really twenty- to thirty-five-year-old males, but the market's getting older all the time.

Peter Friedman: People go nuts for word games with text chat. We have one called Silly Sentences where the moderator, who has special technology tools, will type a word like lazy and you have to make a sentence out of it. Everybody in the room, which could be twenty or thirty people, very quickly type out a sentence with the word, and whoever makes the funniest one wins. The audience does the scoring and people can win prizes.

How many people like to do that? Well, thousands of people play at a time. We've had to hold game marathon weekends to satisfy the demand. It's a substitute for parlour games like Trivial Pursuit.

All the hits, all the time
Ken Auletta: It's wonderfully liberating to suddenly have a distribution system that makes it easy for consumers to get good music. You get to do what I used to do when I was a boy. We had listening booths and you could listen to music before you decided to buy a record.

Now you can go on the Web and listen to cuts from a CD before you decide to buy it. Music has changed; broadcast.com's got 400 radio stations that you can access.

Partly what's happening is the middleman is being eradicated. I can sample music on my computer, then click and order. I don't have to go to a store, I don't have to get in a car, I don't have to move. God, that's heaven. I can have friends over, we can sample music together. That's a mall experience without going to the mall, and it's close to your refrigerator.

Mark Cuban The conventional wisdom says people are just going to download the music they want from the Internet. I don't think that's going to be the preferred model because there will be too many choices. When you've got a million songs, and you can download any one of them, it's too much work. I think we'll have packages and products that are made available to download-for example, the Barry Manilow collection.

In a digital world music doesn't need to be separated from video, so I believe the more likely scenario is that they'll be packaged together and offered like a subscription. So I could order the lifestyle package that appeals to me with the Billboard Top Ten for Baltimore delivered over my cable modem each night, along with my favourite TV shows that I've subscribed to, all coming over my HDTV signal and the DTV card in my PC for $29.99 a month. That subscription could also travel with me.

There will be different devices that are plugged into your PC that you can unplug and take with you, along with your subscription package that you download onto a 3.5-inch, 20-gig hard drive in your car radio that can show video, play music, or provide information. That's how all things digital are going to be distributed; you'll start to see it happening in the next two to three years.

What's on? Everything
Mark Cuban: Broadcast.com enables people to receive traditional media that they don't normally have access to, anywhere there is a computer. For example, if you want to see all the latest fashions from France twenty-four hours a day you can get them. If you're from Baltimore living in Dallas and you want to listen to WBAL, your hometown station, you can hear it.

Previously, if the game wasn't on national TV, you were out of luck. You had to wait for the newspaper to come out in the morning or you could go to a Web page and get the latest scores.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, I live in California, but now I can listen to my favorite announcer call the Pirates' games and, when I close my eyes, it's no different from sitting in Pittsburgh in 1970 listening to the Pirates. The only thing that's changed are the names of the players. That's an experience you couldn't have five years ago. If you want to go back and watch the first episode of I Love Lucy or the first episode of Dragnet or if you want to see crazy drag-racing accidents or see the rivers of Russia or learn about Shakespeare or watch the Alfred Hitchcock movie 39 Steps, it's all available, and more. We're really creating the history of the world; we want to archive everything that we possibly can.

In the future, anybody and everybody are broadcasters, the only difference is whether it's a business or a labour of love. If it's a labour of love, little Johnny's first soccer game goes on the Internet so Grandma can watch. If she's got a cable modem and little Johnny or one of his buddies records the game with a digital videocamera, then it can be plugged into the PC, posted to the family website, and sent to Grandma as an e-mail with a link to the video. Grandma clicks and watches little JohNny's soccer. When you have all these choices, what do you think Grandma's going to watch? ER or little Johnny for the fifteenth time? Grandma's going to watch little Johnny.

The wedding of the century: TV and the Web
Peter Friedman: We know both anecdotally and from research that a lot of people watch TV while they're chatting online and many, especially teens, are chatting instead of watching TV. We've seen teens move from television and from video games to online. The reason is partly bEcause it's interactive, but mostly because it's a social venue; they want to meet and talk with other kids. The same can be said for adults. People like to engage one another; it's a fundamental human need that's become harder and harder to do in the physical world.

Paul Matteucci: Fundamentally, I believe the Internet is threatening TV. This notion is still reasonably controversial because all the data's not in, but when I look at how people are using our site, a typical guy will use it over 100 minutes in a day; he's not doing something else when he's actively playing games. We also know that people who use voice chat spend more than 300 minutes a month doing it. I know that when I'm using voice chat at home, I may have a TV on in the background, but I'm not paying much attention to it.

Mark Cuban: If we go back twenty years to 1979 and I said, let's talk about all the things that are going to change our lives over the next twenty years, we wouldn't say USA Today or MTV. We wouldn't say ESPN or PCs. We wouldn't say microwaves or cellular phones. Yet these are all things that have radically changed our lives in a short period of time. We got rid of turntables, we're getting rid of our tape players.

Is that pace of change going to stop, slow, or accelerate? Well, in a digital world it's going to accelerate because things happen so much more quickly. It wouldn't surprise me if a hundred years from now the word television was out of the vernacular, or if we didn't even use the television. Instead there would be things you watch, things you listen to, as well as new forms of entertainment.

Halsey Minor: Eventually television programming moves over to the Internet; either it happens at the network level, where literally the television programming is distributed over the Internet or it's distributed over the same cable infrastructure, but you overlay the Internet on top of it.

What ends up happening is television will remain a very developed art form, movies will remain the number one way that we entertain ourselves, and the Internet will allow us to supplement them with other kinds of interactive features, including additional information that the user can access or overlay. Other than the Internet becoming the new transport for television programming, I don't see it radically altering the TV experience because people have already voted that they like the TV experience the way it is. The Internet is not going to significantly change television, no more than the VCR really changed movies.

In the future there may be a more seamless blending between what the Web gives you and what TV gives you, but there's a role for both. There's a role for sitting down for a half hour and having somebody program the news for you. There will be a new role for TV producers to allow you to come in and get the news and information you want on demand; some of the very same content that was prepackaged in a half-hour show. I think those two kinds of things will coexist side-by-side, not necessarily forever, but for a very long time.

Ken Auletta: I hated Seinfeld's last episode. If I could, I might want to change that, but will Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld's copyright allow me to change their ending? I don't think so.

Ultimately, what's more likely is that I could watch an episode of Seinfeld and also search for information about Jerry or the other performers. If Jerry mentions the Nazi soup kitchen, I could do a search and all up previous episodes that mention the soup Nazi and watch them.

It's not what the programmers intended me to do, but they won't care. They're still selling the advertising or keeping me on their site, except I've gone in a totally unanticipated direction, one I didn't think about before I started, but one that really excites me.

R.I.P. paper?
Halsey Minor: Right now reading on a monitor is very hard, but I wouldn't want to bet on that continuing ten years from now. Display technology is moving very, vary rapidly. It's just possible that somebody's going to get it right five, seven, or ten years from now and we're going to find out that it's actually easier to carry around a little pad with text on it and, with improved resolution, it's become the preferred form of reading.

It sounds very sci-fi but there's so much content now available electronically-and the technology is happening fast enough-that I think, for the first time, print would come under a fairly ubiquitous challenge.

Now people are a lot less likely to consume the type of content they get from a Vanity Fair or longer-form magazine over the Internet, but I'm not dismissive of that taking place. I think that if somebody can build a tablet that has the right feel, the right size, and the right display resolution, you would see a huge amount of what is typically read in print moved over to an electronic format. I actually believe that within ten years there will be some sort of device that provides a substantive challenge to print-based publishing in terms of resolution display and convenience.

Alvin Toffler: I do believe we're going to have electronic reading devices, not the klutzy kind that we have today, with a very limited number of titles, but customised for the reader. I want mine to have the same weight as a book, to be covered in buckram, and to smell like a book.I can slip the card in or download the content and have any book I want from a vast library of choices. I can increase and decrease the size of the type according to what I like. If I like to read it in blue print instead of black print, I can have that. I can search to find the first appearance of this Russian character, whose name I can't pronounce, so I can find out where that character came from. I can, of course, do all the matching and research and studying that I wish in the book, but it will not look like a book. It will be electronic paper that has the equivalent of pixels in it and which will go dark for some print characters or light for other print characters, as the case may be.

I do believe we are going to have those kinds of readers that we can carry around with us. Everything that you're seeing while sitting there glued in your chair looking up at a monitor, you will be able to have in the palm of your hand or your back pocket. Eventually, they'll probably be cheap enough to pitch.

Ken Auletta: New technology is coming that will make portable books a reality. ClearType, from Microsoft, looks the same as the printed page, the resolution is extraordinary. It means you have a portable reading device that you can hold in your hand, with a screen that'll look no different from the printed page of a book. It will have a little clicker that you click to turn the page. If I could take a six-ounce device on vacation with me that includes five or six books downloaded to little disks half the size of a credit card, I would die for that.

Microsoft, like other companies, is working with manufacturers to create electronic books using this software and doing market research to find out what is the most comfortable form for a portable device.

It's 2005: entertain me
Mark Cuban: In the future there will be optical cables that come into our homes to deliver gigabits of information. When you have a lot of bandwidth, your whole sensory environment can be controlled and become part of your entertainment experience. You might say, "Okay, entertainment-enable my house", and all of a sudden you're watching a movie, you're hearing Surround Sound, and the temperature starts to drop because your thermostat's plugged into the show that's on. You'll hear the blinds flutter and the lights will dim.

For kids today, their PC is their stereo. They listen to CDs on their computer because it has a CD player in it. Five years from now no one will even buy a stereo. They'll go the way of eight-track players. Gone, except for the random turntable. The stereo will be just part of your PC; it'll be a feature.

Paul Matteucci: We've seen the Internet move from an information-based medium to more of a transaction-based medium. Five years from now it'll be a communications medium. It'll be where you go to do everything.

Fast Forward: America's Leading Experts Reveal How The Internet Is Changing Your Life by Alfred C Sikes with Ellen Pearlman; William MorrowDistributed by IBD; $17.50; Pp 298