"I'm not talking necessarily P2P filesharing here, just the distribution in general."
Yes, but when you stated that "you can already download every popular show directly to your computer, and every movie within days of its theatrical release- sometimes sooner." you should realize, and I did point out that, this is done with P2P.
One of the issues with P2P is that very often someone finishes downloading a file before they've uploaded as much as they've downloaded. So they should keep their bittorrent client "seeding" the file after they have downloaded, putting back what they've taken.
Some (perhaps many) people don't do this now, when the files are free. Start charging for files and try using P2P to distribute them and you'll find many more of your downloaders stopping their uploads as soon as they have the file.
This will continue to be a problem as long as connections are asymmetric, with higher download than upload speeds.
