Great post. The one piece to watch will be whether the pipeline will grow fast enough to support the increase in content, particularly video, that will travel through the web. There’s already some of the major broadband providers seeking to change their pricing structure to charge heavy bandwidth users more than light users of the web. This could cause a major digital divide.

I don’t believe immediacy will trump quality. Just as Zara has not put Gucci out of business, and McDonald’s poses no threat to Colborne Lane, so too will YouTube and other streaming platforms fail to kill cinema. This is a discussion of platform, content, and individual desire.

The traditional moviegoing experience won’t be obsolesced by streaming videos and small-screen digital platforms. The change afoot is that moviegoing will be one way of seeing a new film rather than the way. I see content delivery formats and modes as existing on a continuum, and as we move down the continuum, popularity is evenly spaced. For example – in music, while the mp3 is incredibly popular, and downloads surge while CD sales slump, the LP is simultaneously undergoing a niche renaissance – some might even argue it never disappeared at all, but held on to a steady niche appeal with a particular group of consumers.

I believe a surge in convenience retrieves the inconvenient, a surge in the ‘virtual’ retrieves the physical – as a niche pattern. I don’t believe that “snack-sized” media will replace epic visual feasts of film and story, I believe there is room for both, and each will find its place with the consumers who most value their particular advantages.

As the audiophile niche has rediscovered the sonic “warmth” of the LP, so too will cineasts insist upon the “warmth” and authenticity of the traditional theatrical experience, viewing full-length features on projected film, from start to finish. However, what we understand to be a ‘traditional’ moviegoing experience will be but one platform for the consumption of a film. It will be a niche experience and no longer the primary option, or even the most popular option, for visual media. But it will not die.

There will instead be a range of options represented in format and delivery platform, and there will be winners, plural, for each combination of format and delivery that represent the range of goals in user experience. Convenience, for some consumers, will never trump immersion or escape. I believe this idea holds true when discussing nearly every content delivery medium I can think of (from books to blogs and back again.)

I’m sure you’ve heard a new theatrical release reviewed dismissively as a “rental”? This is the behavioral and preferential range I’m talking about. What’s great is that this is about individual taste and the fitness of any medium or platform to the tastes and desires of the individual consumer. I’ll invoke the almighty McLuhan tetrad here, to remind you that any new format or medium may obsolesce another, but it will retrieve still another, and as long as we individuals continue to have a plurality of priorities and desires – desires that vary situationally according to the complex interplay of both contextual and subjective motivational factors as well as our perception of the content itself, then that plurality of goals and desires from person to person (and within one person from situation to situation) will be represented in the range of “winning” media and platforms we popularize.

My two. Keep up the great posts!

About 50% of US households have “broadband” and the job of rebuilding that entire network for 10x speed is going to take a long time.

Also, the typical streaming-video audience that I talked about are more likely to be on university broadband connections, which are generally extremely fast.

But the bigger problem I see is that a) HDDVD/Blu-Ray quality (ie: HD) and even DVD-equivalent is still a ways off from being streamed on-demand and the second I click on the play button (or even within 5-10 minutes). Try downloading an HD film on Apple TV, it takes a while. Tech technology is still not there in Flash or Silverlight either.

The habits that will form in the meantime are what I meant to point out as the biggest real change, and simply providing content the way it is produced now isn’t going to cut it, expectations will probably be changed by the time the two technologies (broadband and video formats) converge.

That is…. I think.