The potential exists. But I don't see it as any sort of definite future.
Queen Victoria wanted television so her subjects could see her. Jenkins was working on the technology in the later part of the 19th century. He got an operational model going by the 1920s. His version had the spinning discs. Not saying he had the best solution, but he was working on it for decades. By the way, what we call television he called radiovision. Televsion was through a wire (what we would call cable television) and he could not afford high enough grade wire to implement it. He also had a concept called radiomovies which might be analogous to where are theaters are going with broadcast events and digital transfer of movies to theaters instead of distributing film prints.
He also perfected a mechanism for movie projectors to keep the film from flapping around and sold his patent to Edison.
The Nazis also worked on television and broadcast the Olympics, Nuremberg Rally, and as the war began used the programming largely for programming for officers and wounded soldiers. The propaganda purposes were not lost on them.
A small technical digression, if you will.
Jenkins and other mechanical TV inventors had systems that could produce about 30 lines (today we'd say 30 by 30 pixels) at around 10 frames per second. At those data rates (in the analog domain, of course) it translated into a bandwidth of a few kilocycles (Hz weren't invented yet <];^).
The good news: These primitive TV signals could fit into any audio technology: phone lines, mechanical records, and ordinary AM broadcast stations. All the early broadcasters of these signals did so on AM broadcasting channels with ordinary transmitters.
The bad news: The more clear-headed of the inventors, and I think Jenkins was one, knew that the system would have to tremendously improve its image quality before the public would accept it.
Two problems with scaling it up: First, they were tearing their hair out trying to do it; ultimately, they failed because the mechanical technology presented pretty much of a brick wall to significant technical improvement.
Second, they would necessarily give up all that cheap, easy-to-come-by storage and transmission. Because instead of a few measly kilocycles, they were going to need systems that could handle at least a megacycle, or five, for a video signal.
The electronic system proponents realized all this, and embarked on an expensive R&D program to make electronic TV work, with new and difficult technology at every point of the chain from the live image to the one in the user's eyeball. (The expense of the project at RCA gave Sarnoff considerable heartburn.)
So you had two competing systems developing: One, with near-immediate payoff but fundamental limits that would keep it from ever becoming a great commercial success, and the other that required a long and ruinously expensive R&D cycle but whose performance promised a chance of universal acceptance; a promise that was ultimately fulfilled.