Many years ago, even before I was born, the cinema faced the threat of TV. “People will never watch movies on a screen that small,” they predicted confidently.
Famous last words. It wasn’t long before TV was showing movies. However, the TV broadcasters soon noticed that in fact the movies were “better on the big screen” as they had been shot for the big screen. Movie houses staggered audiences with vistas and panoramas that become meaningless on the TV screen.
So, TV retaliated. They invented the “made for TV” movie, with a lot of technique borrowed from early soap operas. “Keep them in close up”, “Show them from the waist upwards (that saves on costume costs)” and “Never more than four people on the screen at any one time”.
So the “made for TV” movie showed that TV was in fact a more intimate and close up medium. You can’t really watch TV on a household screen very far away at all. Just look at how many normal-size TV screens you have to put in a banking hall, or just how big those plasma screens have to be!
Now TV screens are getting bigger. People at home are buying costly large screen projectors and fantastically expensive large flat screens, or at least those that can afford them are.
So what’s going to happen now that the cellphone operators are, already in some countries (and testing in South Africa), streaming TV to cellphones?
The broadcasters are very hesitant to echo the supercilious confidence of the movie makers of the 1950s. They are in fact taking to wearing brown trousers.
Maybe people will take to the weenie screen? Maybe the cellphone people have some tricks up their sleeve to provide bigger screens? Maybe people will only use it for important programming like sports and news? Maybe, (horrors!) they will take to dramas on the weenie screen?
Vodacom is predicting it will be able to use the cellphone as a pay-TV decoder so that you can have your smartcard in the cellphone and then (presumably) wireless it to the TV set. But if you can do that, then you will be able to watch on the cellphone as well.
The questions become endless.
How will advertisers take to it? Will it require a new form of production? How do people hear it – or do they just go around looking like they have gigantic hearing aids – like the iPod brigade?
What sort of programming will be in demand? Will it be serious stuff, or are we heading for the “music video on the trot” generation?
These are not idle musings, they are serious stuff. For instance, why on earth would we need High Definition TV if the world is going to receive on a weenie screen? If we haven’t invested the billions we need to in HDTV yet, should we get out while the going is good?
At the same time, do you think the movie distributors are walking around in blue trousers? No, box office takings in the USA were down seven percent last year, and local takings about the same. So far the US box office looks to be going the same way this year. What future is there left for the cinema business? Is it always going to be “better on the big screen”, or is it just going to be the poor man’s IMAX?
There are no answers yet, but you can be sure that the guys who come up with the answers, and patent them, are in for big bucks.
Howard Thomas has been working in entertainment and media for 36 years. His experience with TV started from the beginning in South Africa, and he is now a media business consultant, trainer and specialist in audience psychology.