Odd analogy; one need not go to the TV studio to see the news broadcast, any more than one must go to the printing press to read the paper. Television, for all its very real failings, is 'delivered' at the speed of light....
Yes, TV is delivered, so my analogy is not very real - I was referring to what good TV news would be if if it were NOT delivered, as is becoming the case in many areas for those who do not have cable access. Or my old analogy, if mail would never be delivered but would always have to be picked up by going to the post office, just to find out there is none. And using a browser requires many times more data transfer for the same information than a mail client, which has a simple protocol to determine what, if anything, is new. Now if someone wrote a SIMPLE program to query the Forum website to see what is newer than my last access...
A very important reason for receiving all posts by (e)mail is that my email is stored on my system locally. I can access it whether or not I have access to the Internet! This is particularly relevant to those who provide service to clients (whether corporate in-house, repair business, or just helping friends). In some business environments you are disconnected from the Internet, only intranet is available.
Yes, I am aware that with the proliferation of wide-band internet access the old "time-share" approach is making a come-back, just replacing the old telephone line access with the 'net, but IMHO it is a great waste of the power of the local computer, esp. when you run server-side programs from your workstation - it is using a tiny fraction of its computing power, while waiting for the availability of computing power on a shared resource. In fact I had long been advocating distributed databases (just as long as physical protection of the locally stored data is commensurate with its nature), with each transaction just validating that its local data is current. This matches the principle used my many browsers to verify that the locally cached copy of a web page to be displayed is not obsolete, and downloading only if it isn't. A browser-based forum cannot do that. It increases the internet traffic and the load on the server tremendously!