Why go to the movies when you can watch from the comfort of your laptop? Well, it could be illegal for starters. Then there's the poor picture quality, and that annoying man on his way back from the loo. Davin O'Dwyerreports.
WHO doesn't love going to the cinema? From the jockeying for the best seats to the sense of promise at the dimming of the lights, it offers a pleasure quite apart from the movie-watching itself. Above all, it's about losing yourself in the story up on the big screen.
Of course, more people watch movies in the comfort of their own living rooms than at the omniplex. All the industry talk now is about high-definition format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, but in all likelihood, both formats have already lost, because the future isn't high-definition but low-resolution. Film-makers might make their movies for the cinema auditorium, but increasingly, those films are going to be watched on computer monitors and three-inch iPod screens, and we're going to be downloading the movies rather than renting them from Xtra-vision.
This shift has already begun, but as usual the gulf between where the technology is at and where the movie studios want it to be is huge, so the options are many.
Legally, there are a few services, such as Apple's iTunes store, Movielink and CinemaNow, that allow you to buy the movie and download it to your computer's hard drive (though not in Ireland, so far).
After that, you enter the legally grey area of BitTorrent and movie streaming, and by grey I mean mostly illegal. BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer download protocol, has a massive user base that will quickly seed versions of the latest releases on to the multitude of BitTorrent sites for other users to spread. So far, so techy.
The other option, one that is becoming increasingly popular, are the numerous sites, such as www.alluc.org and www.surfthechannel.com, that offer links to films on YouTube-style video-streaming sites such as www.veoh.com and www.youku.com that, often unwittingly, host versions of newly-released films. It's almost as simple as Googling them - sounds like a winner, right? Well, no.
There are at least three reasons why this is a bad way to consume movies. The first is that the video-streaming sites routinely remove copyrighted material as soon as it's discovered, so the link to a stream of National Treasure: Book of Secrets, for instance, will probably be out of date by the time you click on it, resulting in a wild goose chase of broken links.
The second reason is that there's a darn good reason why most YouTube clips last less than two minutes, and that's because watching anything longer on a small, pixelated window with dodgy sound is enough to destroy anyone's love of cinema. The average three-minute music video is the upper limit for most people's YouTube attention span, so a 90-minute Hollywood release is an endurance test beyond the call of duty. Even 20-minute episodes of Family Guy lose some of their entertainment value.
But what ultimately makes furtively searching around for streamed versions of new releases an annoying experience is the fact that the versions are usually shot with camcorders from the back of the auditorium.You have no idea what a crummy approximation of movie watching it is until you've tried it.
Why movie studios are so paranoid about people shooting films with camcorders is beyond me - it's safe to assume that anyone willing to sit through more than 30 seconds of a camcordered version of a movie is unlikely ever to be tempted to pay for the privilege. These people simply don't like movies enough to watch them properly, never mind shell out for them.
For example, if you really, really want to find how good Johnny Depp is at cutting hair in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street before it even gets released here, you can look it up on www.peekvid.com and find a copy of it on a video-streaming site and find a highly-pixelated version with unwelcome, audience-generated sound effects. Not, surely, part of Tim Burton's gothic vision.
Want to see Tom Hanks doing misty-eyed patriotism as only he can in Charlie Wilson's War? A link is right there on www.bringpopcorn.com, but be prepared for some extra-shaky camera work. Can't be arsed catching I Am Legend in the local megaplex? There's a version, divided into four parts, on www.youku.com. But the crummy computer-generated vampires look even more crummy when viewed on a three-inch browser window.
There is no reason why watching films on computers and hand-held devices will not some day be a regular, and even enjoyable, way of consuming movies. The image-compression technology will get better, and we will become used to the viewing experience.
It's just one more step away from movie-watching as a communal activity, so while film-makers, will continue to dream of creating work for the biggest canvasses, but their work will more than likely end up in our pockets.
