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This makes me a much more impatient viewer. If a video doesn't grab me immediately, I kill it. But when a show does engage me, the connection is deeper. The wide-screen image is a foot or two from my face, filling my field of vision. The connection is tactile and intimate. (Coincidentally, I'm told the Internet is also a popular medium for porn.) As you lean in, focusing physically and mentally on, say, an episode of The Wire, watching becomes something more like reading.
I apologize to all the English teachers to whom I have just given aneurysms. But the watching-as-reading analogy is true in more ways than one. Whereas channel-surfing is like turning on a faucet, finding a show online is more like rummaging through a new-and-used bookstore, where House is shelved next to Hill Street Blues. (See the top 10 iPhone applications.)
Like reading, viewing online TV is more solitary. You don't gather the family around your MacBook to watch the Super Bowl. Yet in some ways it's more social. There's no online-video TV Guide to rely on--though some start-ups, like eGuiders.com are trying to create one--so your social connections become your TV guide. And the same interactivity that enhances regular TV-watching is even more immediate with laptop in hand. When I watch Lost, I rush to write a blog post--not so much to get my thoughts out as to see the comments fill and find out what other people thought. When the show is over, it's just begun.
Big Screen, Little Screen
Does this mean I'm ready to abandon that video altar in my living room? Oh, God, no. When my TiVo box was finally replaced, I ran back to my big-screen TV like a child reunited with his mother. (Not as fast as my kids, who quickly began TiVoing a new stash of Clone Wars episodes.)
But what we once called the "small screen" is fading away. We'll have tiny screens and giant screens: online devices and ever cheaper flat-screen video walls. To me, lush cinematic shows like Big Love and Mad Men need a big canvas; for others, it's football that demands the real estate. Some shows are more interchangeable. I was not surprised to find that MTV's The Hills, with its sleek visuals and forgettable dialogue, is perfectly suited to the bauble-like screen of the iPhone.
So some shows will be big and grand for the giant screen. Other shows, like Comedy Central's on- and off-line hits, will thrive on both platforms. Producers will start conceiving series both as whole entities and repurposable parts--like the Jan. 31 SNL skit involving Pepsi that ran the next night as a Super Bowl ad for Pepsi.
Media messages will be tailored both ways: already, President Obama is doing network TV to broadcast messages wide, and online videos for a more intimate, fireside-chat connection. And as more people watch traditional TV on the tiny screen and online video on the big one, more will jump the boundaries. Collegehumor.com just debuted a show on MTV, while this spring ABC premieres In the Motherhood, a sitcom based on a webisode series.
All this may change traditional TV, but the tiny screen could also revive genres. For a decade, sitcoms have struggled on big networks. But online, few offerings do as well as humor. Be it funnyordie.com or the faux Japanese talk series Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, people want the tiny screen to make them laugh.
Some would argue that that's a matter of scale--that it's impossible to be moved by something in a 4-in. (10 cm) video window. I'm not so sure. Hunched over my tiny screens lately, I've found myself riveted by Battlestar Galactica, provoked by a YouTube animation about the credit crisis and verklempt over an old video I posted of my son blowing bubbles in the bathtub. Big screen and tiny may have their differences, but where there's engagement, there's emotion. The screen that matters most is still the one where the story lingers and replays, inside your head.