With heartfelt apologies to John Donne, recent events compel me to ask not for whom the bell tolls, but to propose that it tolls, pretty loudly, for CD. And DVD. And HDD. Oh, and of course for Thee (this last a sop to all you literary traditionalists out there).

The news of the last couple of weeks suggests that a long-brewing shift in how we consume our movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, newspapers and other media is about to speed up, a lot, thanks to several very big kicks in the keister.

What’s it all mean? To start, I’d sell off that optical-disc duping factory if I were you. And you may want to get out of the hard-drive and home networked-storage businesses, too. They’re on the way to buggy-whip status and fast.

All of a sudden, we’re moving a lot more quickly to a world where most of our media content will be sitting...