Will The Internet Ever Kill The Cinema Experience?

Modern Day Myth Prod. LLC

Modern Day Myth Prod. LLC

I love seeing movies on the big screen with friends. It is a great outing and it beats hanging around the same four walls all of the time.

Is the Internet going too far trying to steal content from the big screen with exclusive VODs and DVDs?
 
Modern Day Myth Prod. LLC said:
I love seeing movies on the big screen with friends. It is a great outing and it beats hanging around the same four walls all of the time.

Is the Internet going too far trying to steal content from the big screen with exclusive VODs and DVDs?
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In the short term - no. I look at outfits such as 'Vue' in the UK and they have been going from strength to strength. Also the smaller movie houses are packed in London. Can't get tickets to their weekend shows as they always seem to be sold out.

My girlfriend and I love to go to th Everymans in London because they serve great mojitos and bring them to wherever we are seated plus the food is good. They are making a ton of money and show absolutely fantastic films all the time. They will go on forever!
 
I think there's always going to be a niche for independent cinema's. True, I don't go to the cinema half as much as I used to and it seems they are getting more and more expensive - but I don't think the internet will all-out destroy the cinema business.
 
They thought the VCR would kill it, and it didn't either. Cinema will be here to stay, because of the social experience - people like to go out with friends, and the larger screen offers an experience that the computer monitor will not.
 
The internet is not very good for playing movies though. Sometimes the movies pause and pixelating, downloading stalls and does not work a lot. The theater has a lot less screw ups by comparison, and so does TV. Even Netflix I find is down or faulty, 20% of the time.

I think the internet is the most inferior source for the movie experience, and only used by people who think it's somehow better. Don't get me wrong I love the internet for other things, but you don't use it to do a TV or theater's job, if you want top quality service.
 
harmonica44 said:
The internet is not very good for playing movies though. Sometimes the movies pause and pixelating, downloading stalls and does not work a lot. The theater has a lot less screw ups by comparison, and so does TV. Even Netflix I find is down or faulty, 20% of the time.

I think the internet is the most inferior source for the movie experience, and only used by people who think it's somehow better. Don't get me wrong I love the internet for other things, but you don't use it to do a TV or theater's job, if you want top quality service.
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Transmission speeds are a serious problem, and so is the clunky nature of computers, as opposed to movie projectors or TV.
 
Exactly. My friend took an hour just to figure out how to watch a movie online, as oppose to putting a DVD in the DVD player, hooked up to the TV. He said it was worth it cause the internet has HD. Not an extra hour of my time, it's not.
 
"Ever" is a long time, so who can say but in the short and medium term the internet will not kill cinema. The social side of going to the cinema has already been mentioned but cinema has effectively been in a technological race with TV for many decades, with TV always playing catch-up. The technological race is based on improving the experience, on the basis that audiences will pay a premium for this enhanced experience. High frame rate 3D is the current enhancement visually which cinema has and TV/home entertainment does not. Being visually oriented, many here do not take much account of sound but this is patently not true of general audiences. The audio side of film making has been a particularly important part of this technological race since the late 70's and even more so recently. Theatrical 5.1 sound can only be fully experienced in the home in extreme circumstances and is old technology as far as cinema is concerned. The current cutting edge of cinema sound cannot be reproduced in the home under any circumstances and this is going to remain the case for the foreseeable future.

I do think BluRay/internet/HD home entertainment systems will continue to chip away at cinema audience numbers but I don't see it completely killing cinema any time soon.

G
 
this is only possible in case people have money , resource, place to make thier private set ups where they can make similar enviornment like hall . .. . . .
 
No, you cannot convert something like a hall in to a cinema, or rather you can but the difficulty and cost of the conversion means it would almost certainly be cheaper to design and build a full size cinema from scratch.

G
 
I don't think it will kill it, but it's certainly doing some maiming.

As mentioned in a similar recent thread though - it's not a question of whether VOD will kill going to the theater, it's simply a question of individual available time vs. options to fill that time. General internet content, social media, casual gaming online and on mobile, youtube and other vod - it's all immediate, easy and 'free' (from a content standpoint) while also pre-emptively consuming a significant portion of many people's budgets (monthly charges for high-speed and mobile data). So it eats up time and money that isn't being spent going to the theater.
 
harmonica44 said:
The internet is not very good for playing movies though. Sometimes the movies pause and pixelating, downloading stalls and does not work a lot. The theater has a lot less screw ups by comparison, and so does TV. Even Netflix I find is down or faulty, 20% of the time.

I think the internet is the most inferior source for the movie experience, and only used by people who think it's somehow better. Don't get me wrong I love the internet for other things, but you don't use it to do a TV or theater's job, if you want top quality service.
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This depends heavily on where you live though. My high speed internet is fast (50Mbit) and reliable. We watch HD streaming all the time, via Netflix, HBO/Max GO, Amazon instant, Hulu, youtube & vimeo - and on my big screen tv it often looks better than the signal I get from the cable company. I'm not sure how much longer I'll even keep the cable television subscription - really I'm just waiting for the premium channels to offer streaming subscriptions outside of a cable network.

So yes - I do only use the internet because I "think it's somehow better". But that's because it's actually really good for me, better than cable tv in many ways. It's certainly not a theater experience (my tv isn't that big...yet) but it also doesn't have some of the annoyances of the theater - like the family that brought their 3 year old to an R rated movie, and when he started talking they gave him an iPad to play with so he'd be quiet... bad enough that it was very bright in the dark theater, but they didn't even turn the sound off. So now we had the bright ipad, the sounds of the game, and the kid laughing when he won... and then their newborn started crying. Yay, theater experience...
 
Big Screen! For me, it's all about scale. I have a projector at home with a 103.5" diagonal... I want bigger for the cinema experience... the internet goes to much smaller screens than the cinema has... including mine.
 
wheatgrinder said:
The megagigataplxes in my area are dead zones on anything other than prime time weekends.. I dont know why they even bother to open..
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Yeah, but you live in an area that has five times more deer than people. :P

In little 'ol Richmond, VA (and we're a small city), the local multiplex is PACKED on Tuesdays (discount night), and almost as busy on Thursdays as it is on Fridays (I'm starting to understand why studios have made it standard practice to have advance screenings on Thursdays).

Asking if the internet will ever kill cinema is like asking if Swanson TV dinners will ever kill dine-in restaurants.
 
So something occurred to me yesterday as I was driving through the CA central valley...

What killed the Drive-In?

I see little or no technological reason why drive-ins would have died. If anything our cars are more comfortable than ever, with better sound systems, and people seem to still like to drive them as much as ever. Why were drive-ins so popular at one time, and why is the landscape now dotted with their weathered corpses? And is there any clue in their fate to that of the modern cineplex?
 
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