Will technology kill movies and newspapers?

Here are excerpts from an interesting column from pcmag.com:


Newspapers and Movies—Both Fading Fast
ARTICLE DATE: 09.19.05

By John C. Dvorak

There are two important institutions that are about to be decimated by technology: newspapers and movies. It won't be pretty.

The biggest impact technology has had on any social institution is moviegoing. I think moviegoing is doomed to die off slowly unless Hollywood can come up with a reasonable new experience. As it now stands, I can feed an HDTV signal into a standard Toshiba LCD projector through the composite video ports and blow out a 100-inch 16:9 image on a screen and get a theater experience in the home. With progressive scan or line-doubling DVD players, the experience is phenomenal. Use a DLP theater projector or a large-screen plasma display, and you're in heaven.

So why do I now want to go to the theater? Do I want to go because it's more expensive than a DVD rental? Do I want to go for the greasy popcorn coated with trans-fat butter-flavored oil? Do I want to go so I can hear cell phones going off? The only reason you may want to go is if you can see the big-screen version of the movie and the movie has big-screen impact. In Europe and Asia they still have massive theaters with screens as huge as the ones in the old American drive-ins—a real event and a real group experience. In the United States this is rare.

Now with the DVD and the so-called home theater, the average experience is simply better at home. You can stop the movie when you want. You can eat dinner while watching. You can pause the movie and examine a scene more closely. The only thing you really miss is the group experience of sitting in an audience with a hundred or more strangers who react to the film.

Also, they are starting to bring the release of the DVD closer and closer to the release of the movie. This means that eventually they will be released at the same time, and only the most spectacular movies will get any attendance. All the art and small films will just be DVDs. This means that essentially all but a few movies will eventually be nothing more than made-for-TV movies going immediately to DVD.

Does this kill Hollywood? And what does it do for the public need for great movies? This is the baffling part of this scenario.

I've been thinking about it because another American institution is under attack simultaneously: the printed newspaper. Newspapers, once fat and happy with local ads and classifieds, have all bloated up, with too many staffers producing a minimal amount of content per person. An average reporter was once supposed to write 75 column inches a week.

This was justifiable when the newspapers were rolling in dough, but craigslist has probably sunk the business, with free classified advertising that is far more useful and functional than anything delivered by any newspaper. There was a lot of money made by the classifieds. That money is gone. Nobody knows how the newspapers can recover. Nobody.

Curiously, many newspapers rely on big income from movie advertising. There goes another income stream, as that business begins to fade. Another irony is that today's newspapers report celebrity gossip as a form of news, helping to prop up the Hollywood machine. And since newspapers and their movie reviews help pump up sales of blockbuster films, we have an interesting chicken-and-egg dilemma. What got eaten first? The chicken or the egg? We are essentially going to watch two American institutions shrink or fragment into new forms that will probably resemble their earliest iterations, both small by today's standards.