With relevance to current students, the author has observed that when commuting by public transport, there is a near complete use of audio-visual devices by the "plugged-in" under 30 age group. New technology, new generation, and new allocations of time to work and study are combining to diminish lecture attendances. Some colleagues refuse to make lecture recordings available, but that strikes the author as a Luddite's denial of the new reality. If the students learn effectively then there is no problem with allowing them to manage their own learning activities. It may even be that lecture attendance is counterproductive because there is evidence that the university students who downloaded a podcast lecture achieved higher assessment results than those who attended the lecture in person. In this article, the author discusses how downloaded lectures have been shown to produce better assessment outcomes. The author contends that if a virtual lecture can have better outcomes than a real time lecture then it makes sense to select the best virtual lectures in the world to offer in a course.