In the fyoo-ture, TV will be so much cooler.
There's something amazing about watching a movie in a theatre, in the dark where there's nothing to distract you from the story and what's happening, your whole view blocked by the images on the screen, surrounded by like-minded strangers. A good audience can really enhance the viewing, making it stronger, better. It's a shared experience that feels almost like bonding.
But there's also something to be said about watching movies on TV at home. See, if you watch it on DVD, it's a smaller screen and there's more to distract you, but you're in charge. You can stop, pause, back up and replay. If it's on TV, though, you can't do any of that. There's an urgency when you're watching it on television, especially if it's network TV and there's commercials every four minutes: what happens next? How much time do I have to get something to eat before it comes back? Have I missed anything vital that I should know for the rest of the movie? You don't get this sort of imperative need when you're watching on DVD, with the clicker in your hand and your life demanding your attention; when you're in control, you can always stop it and come back later, but when the network is in control, you can't. Even if you're watching, say, TNT, where the movie will undoubtedly be played another seventy-three times before disappearing back into the archives, there's still that idea that you could miss something, that you'll have lost some part of the experience. It makes the movie like a little simulation of the theatre experience, and, at least for old movies, before the way movies were made and shown started to change, it's intrinsic to the experience of watching.
Now that TV has gone digital and there are the DVD-type conveniences of DVR and TiVo and such, there's a new movie-on-TV experience happening. Already, you can pause live TV and manipulate it the way you would on DVD, eliminating the need to worry about missing something, which manages to save you the trouble and make the viewing more convenient, but it also takes away that urgency; hopefully, movie-makers will pick up the slack by making movies compelling enough that you don't want to stop and pause and rewind them. The next step of this sort of customizable viewing, however, would be the addition of special features to television viewing: the ability to add deleted scenes back in while watching, the option of turning on a commentary track or seeing a behind-the-scenes mini-documentary of how the scene you're watching was made and why it's so amazing, to get background info on the characters by cross-referencing them with previous scenes, other movies, episodes of shows, even their IMDB profile or official websites, that you could click on while watching, and find out all you need to know to fully understand the show. We're in a tightly-cross-referenced post-modern world. It's only a matter of time before television becomes part of that, one with the net and the information sources that help us understand. We can miss the old, simpler and more visceral ways of viewing, but we can also look forward to the new ways that are sure to come-- and really, once all that cross-linking is in place, we could all just periodically choose not to click on the links, and watch movies on TV how we used to, all at once and with all the urgency of living through them ourselves. Just once in a while.
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