Nick Groke (December 5
For now, Blu-ray remains the optimal choice for audiophiles and videophiles who care about the very best sound and picture quality. Home theater PCs and media servers are viable now because physical storage — aka hard disk drives — are cheaper now than ever before. Don’t discount the picture quality of old film just because HD movies are a new phenomenon. Drives with 1 terabyte of storage — that’s 1000 gigabytes — sell for less than $100. Since the height of the DVD’s popularity, computer storage has changed enormously as well. That’s enough space to hold dozens of HD movies.
The capability to do this has expanded enormously with faster broadband Internet connections, Wi-Fi and devices built to take advantage of those technologies. The wide selection of media streamers on the market today means these devices range in design and functionality. Media streamers or players rely on other sources of content and are designed to be plugged directly into your TV to provide an easy interface for playing video. Media streamers are essentially small computers, usually lacking the expansive storage capacity of a TiVo’s hard drive. On the other end of the spectrum is the $200 Boxee Box: Not only can the Boxee stream virtually any kind of media file from a computer over Wi-Fi, it outputs video in 1080p and automatically organizes and labels content.
All our media playing devices and storage formats would be pointless without a TV worth connecting them to. With HDTVs, watching a movie at home can look every bit as good as a theatrical showing — and home HD projectors go that extra step by replicating the theatrical experience of watching a projected image on a silver screen. And here’s the great thing about HDTV technology: As movie theaters charge more money for tickets every single year, TVs get cheaper.
As ticket prices gouge our wallets for larger helpings of cash, home theater technologies grow all the more affordable and sophisticated. In addition to the basic convenience of watching at home, 3-D televisions offer something the movie theater can’t match: choice. If the box office doesn’t watch out, these inventions will keep sending those ticket sales down, down, down. Those are just a pair of the 10 TV technologies making movie theaters obsolete. Major electronics companies want in on the profits and are marketing 3-DTVs as the next big thing in HD. The current standard in flat-screen TVs is called active shutter 3-D. This technology uses battery-powered glasses to “shutter” an image in one eye and then the other.
Again, it’s all about availability. As Netflix continues to offer subscribers more content for their entertainment dollar, movie theaters ask for more money to see a single movie. Are big-screen TVs killing the film industry? How have DVDs changed the lifespan of TV shows? For less than the price of a single movie ticket, Netflix offers instant access to hundreds of movies and television programs, and the available content is always expanding as Netflix secures new licensing deals. Netflix and the other home-theater innovations we’ve discussed in this article demonstrate the best conveniences of all the modern technologies making theaters obsolete. In the coming years, theaters will have to work hard to find new ways to be relevant as tech marches on. More than any other content provider, Netflix has changed the way we watch movies.
