I agree that remote tower technology will become the normal, however like Lead Balloon I have not seen much progress. Örnsköldsvik Airport, controlled from the LFV Remote Tower Centre 123 km (76 mi) away in Sundsvall, opened in 2015, that was nearly five years ago. Airservices later trialled the technology at Alice Springs, remoted back to Melbourne, but then nothing!
Currently the Airservices web site tells us they have let a contract for Sydney Airport, I believe this may be to replicate the Heathrow contingency plan whereby the Heathrow Tower simulator can take over some 80% of the workload if the ATC Tower becomes unusable. (Not covered by any civil aviation regulations in Australia so regulatory approval will be interesting) Other wise there has been talk of replacing Canberra and Essendon with remote towers because the current ones need to be moved. There has also been speculation about Ballina - but is a presently uncontrolled airport a good place to start trials of remote tower technology?
The issue with remote towers is that they are just that. Exactly what you have now from a manned tower, but delivered from a remote location. The saving is purely in the cost of the building - a steel column capable of supporting a person or a steel column capable of supporting some cameras. (Very expensive cameras, by the way, and did I mention the high bandwidth/low latency data connection? Oh yes, the NBN!). Are there any other cost savings? Not in my opinon, until you can control more than one airport (as demonstrated in the video above), and that is a human factors nightmare unless the airports are very simple and have very low traffic levels. In Australia if airports are simple with very low traffic levels, unlike Sweden, we let RPT jets operate without restrictions with a CTAF and CAR 166E. (Except Ballina where apparently CAR 166E does not operate!)
So the chances of a remote tower at Ballina are just that, remote. And if there was one built tomorrow, under the Airservices airspace methodology it would have to include a procedural approach controller - Wow, I did not see that in the video!
My view of remote tower technology is that a lot of the technology will find it's way into the current ATC towers, that Airservices will try to use it where they need to build new Towers for other reasons, Canberra, Essendon, Sunshine Coast, but it is still too expensive for low traffic regional airports that proliferate in Australia. But I guess we will see.....