[Image: Robert Anders/Flickr]
Watching movies at home today is much different than what many of us experienced growing up. Instead of watching low-quality CRT screens with spotty reception, today we can enjoy ultra-HD quality without stuttering or visual snow. Instead of being tied to VHS, DVDs, or live broadcasts, we now have access to thousands of titles right when we want with just a remote in hand.
Whether looking at the media delivery systems or the televisions themselves, decades of slow evolution have taken us many miles from where we began. This raises a question, of where is left to explore, and where might the media experience fundamentally change in the years and decades to come.
Living in the Future
It’s hard to appreciate given how much we take it for granted, but the technology of today has already reached some key fundamental endpoints. That is to say, we’ve hit a barrier in some instances where technological leaps don’t offer any truly appreciable steps forward. This happens in many types of media eventually, and movies are just one illustration.
Consider digital interactive entertainment as an example of games that don’t rely on ever-increasing polycount or visual effects. The Fishin’ Frenzy online slot game is a perfect demonstration of this point. This 5×3 slot game already looks great, and it doesn’t require much processing power from desktop or laptop systems. There’s no reason to add more visual detail in this case, since it won’t improve the experience. This is different to films, where the idea of us reaching a kind of natural endpoint is most obvious with resolution.
For decades, we’ve been striving to hit higher resolutions in TVs and movies. This started with what was essentially 480 lines of resolution on old CRT TVs up to the new 4K TV standard. While 8K screens do exist, they’re practically useless as explained over at CNET given the limitations of human vision. There’s already too much visual information for us to see, so adding more is pointless unless you own a screen of over 100 inches.
Lower Costs
The one big advantage we see unavoidable in the future of movie-watching technology is the lowering of costs. Each of the smaller aspects that don’t offer transformative advantages over modern systems will become more affordable, and thus more available to the average viewer. When this happens, we’ll all experience slow but general increases in visual quality, even if many of us don’t notice them beyond a few hours of viewing.
The ultimate takeaway here is that sometimes it’s best to look back and appreciate the road traveled. The viewing experiences we have at home today would be mind-blowing to movie fans of a short few decades ago, and we need to better appreciate this fact. It might seem an unsatisfying answer, but like anything in life, stopping and smelling the roses can be a wonderful thing.
