(FORTUNE Magazine) – A few weeks ago my son, Stewart III, who is about to turn 16, figured out Gnutella. I could write a whole column about the fact that I'm still not sure exactly how he did this and about not being able to use Gnutella myself, even though he has installed it on the family PC and has become adept at using it. What this experience leads me to, instead, is speculation about whether the film industry can be Napsterized. Will the digital revolution make feature films and maybe TV shows freely available on the Internet? Will it threaten the economic model for those industries, the way Napster threatens the model for the music industry?

In case you've been asleep at the keyboard for the past several months, Napster is software that you can download free in order to find and "share" music files on other people's hard disks across the Internet--free. If you have a high-speed connection--at work, at college, or (least likely) at home--Napster makes it incredibly easy to collect thousands of digital tracks of your favorite music.

Napster has inspired other programs, including Scour, Freenet, and Gnutella, each with a different twist. Like Napster, Gnutella lets people share files directly, but it doesn't require them to use a central directory, and it enables them to share all kinds of files, not just music. It is unfinished software that appeared only briefly on the Web before being removed from its original source. So it's not very easy to find, install, or use.

But Stewart did all three. The reason he did is that he had heard he could get Gladiator, the recent swords-and-sandals epic starring Russell Crowe, from the Gnutella network and play it on our computer. Stewart has become something of a digital video junky; he has assembled a world-class collection of DVDs, can play our TiVo digital video device like a fine instrument (my firm is an investor in TiVo, and I am one of its directors), and has begun to figure out how to view videos on our PC. When he heard you could download Gladiator using Gnutella, he went to work.

It turns out you can get Gladiator on the Internet--sort of. The version you get appears to have been recorded on videotape with a video camera at a movie theater. When the movie plays on your computer, the image quality is terrible and the frame fills only about a quarter of the computer screen. Even so, the digital file is so large it has been split into two parts; on our DSL connection at Digital Manor, which can download an MP3 music file in minutes, each half of Gladiator would take eight hours.

I'm sure someone has managed to download all of Gladiator, but despite Stewart's efforts over a couple of weeks, he never got more than a few minutes. And watching that opening battle sequence on a computer just doesn't cut it as a viewing experience.

So the answer to my question, about whether the film industry will be Napsterized, is not yet. One big reason is technology--it's still too primitive. But technology always overcomes, eventually. From my work with TiVo, I know you can get 30 hours of VHS-quality video on a hard disk just four times as big as the hard disk in a typical PC. Though most of us don't own PCs with hard disks that big, we will soon; ordinary PCs should have 30 to 40 gigabytes of capacity in the next two years.

Another technology problem is that most of us don't have fast enough Internet connections. For us to download a full-screen, VHS-quality version of Gladiator would take several days! The plain fact is that the Internet lacks the capacity to ship such large files easily. But technology always gets better, faster, and cheaper, right? A year ago we couldn't download music files the way we now do. So how long will it be before we can download movies at the quality and speed we want? With all of the investment in optical components and photonic networks, at least some of us will be connected, probably at work or at universities, to networks able to transfer extremely large files in a couple of hours, or at least overnight, by 2005. These things won't happen at home for at least another six to eight years, if that soon.

So put yourself in the year 2010 at Digital Manor, by which time we'll have a 100-gigabit connection. Stewart, of course, will be going on 26 and living somewhere else. But downloading will have been productized for the mass market by then, so even I will be able to figure out how to get movies off the Internet.

Will we be downloading hundreds of bootleg films to watch on our PCs whenever we want? Maybe I'm still an old-media, analog kind of guy, but that just doesn't make sense to me. I've listened to some songs hundreds of times in my life and still enjoy them. But I don't think I've watched any movie more than three times voluntarily. So out there in 2010, I don't think I'd have any problem at all paying a few bucks to watch a movie, particularly if the seller made it really easy to get and ensured that it was really good quality. Perhaps film executives have less to worry about than their counterparts in the music business, after all.

STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as noted, neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. He can be reached at alsop_infotech@fortunemail.com. His column can be bookmarked online at www.fortune.com/technology/alsop/.