Kodak, the 131-year-old stalwart of American business, has filed for bankruptcy protection, and while it seems mean-spirited to use their flailing business as a launching point to speculate on which other businesses may go the same way, I’ll be doing it anyway.

I like Kodak. It was one of the only companies that wholly withdrew from South Africa during the apartheid (though this may have been because they were threatened with the loss of US business if they continued to trade in South Africa). They have been a bastion of film and cameras for decades, with the phrase “a Kodak moment” being bandied about (not for too much longer, one hopes).

But, despite what seemed an overwhelmingly strong business, they are floundering. And it’s all because of the dastardly digital camera. I saw this coming. I called it. Me, and, you know, everyone ever. A technology comes along that produces the same great quality for much less — less money and less hassle. That is a game changer — and one that Kodak even had a hand in, for goodness sake! But they just didn’t change fast enough.

Other industries that I foresee failing unless they change, and quickly, are: video stores (take a look at another article about this Blockbuster’s Swan Song), broadcast TV and traditional advertising.

So, video stores need no more mention. But broadcast TV is out and soon, I think. The rise of internet TV will crush broadcast TV like some accent-neutral terminator. Right now South Africa doesn’t have the bandwidth to sustain this technology, which will be based on streaming content straight off the net, but I am assured that soon we will have awesome speeds, lightning speeds, speeds better than our now tippy-top speed of around 3mbps. With internet TV you will be able to fully customise your content, watching only what you want, when you want. There will also be subscription channels for brain-neutral watching.

I worry that this change will negatively affect the production of shows. What will we do if producers can no longer pay the likes of Chevy Chase to keep us laughing? But where there’s bad TV there’s a way. One avenue will be the subscribe channels; another will be advertising on pages.

Which brings us to the last to go, traditional advertising. Gone are the days of ads interrupting our view — on highways, while watching Master Chef USA or in magazines. And it cannot happen soon enough. People are turning towards content marketing. Rather than buying a product on trust because a company has pinky-promised it’s great, we go looking for the products online. We search for information about them, check out reviews and make an informed decision. We find out about new products by reading reviews and then check around to see what other people are saying about it. Brand still means something. But a particular brand will only continue to mean something if it has value-adding content on its site.

Unless traditional ad agencies start jumping on the online bandwagon, and weigh-in early, their empires will crumble — and the same goes for TV broadcasting companies. They need to wake-up and smell the stats or take a picture out of Kodak’s book.

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