DigitalBeat

“Get ready for a lot more ways to catch a movie,” Sarah McBride, Wall Street Journal staff reporter, writes in an article entitled “The Way We’ll Watch.” So I grab that bucket of popcorn I have sitting around for moments like this — y’know, for when I get to learn about the future.

Will I be able to watch 3D movies on an iPhone? Will movie theaters start renting out space on a BYODM (bring-your-own-digital-movie) basis? Will the online and offline worlds finally merge to allow me to choose my own adventure while watching a film?

Nope.

Behold: Kiosks

“Coming soon: kiosks that can burn a copy of a movie while you wait, from a library of thousands of titles.”

Uh, what?

It seems like it would be more convenient and efficient to just download a movie at home, but perhaps owning a movie without the actual DVD to pop in just doesn’t feel right? If you don’t have a physical copy of that movie, maybe it’s not really yours. Maybe it just sits in a state of digital ether you’ll never be able to grasp. That reminds me of when I once read about how shampoo doesn’t really have to have suds (cue “The More You Know” public broadcast television music). But people feel like shampoo should have foam, so they buy it with the extra stuff that makes it lather. But I digress.

Chat on Your DVD

So DVD sales are slipping. How does one fix that? Switch gears to cater more to the growing trend of downloading films? Nah. Why do that when you can make DVDs more social? After all, social media is the pixie dust that was sprinkled on the internet to revive it back in ‘04, right?

So big studios like Universal and Walt Disney Co. are now using “a technology called BD Live to make the discs part movie, part game and part social network … [which] friends across the country can use … to chat with each other on the TV screen while they’re watching the movie. The text goes in a box over a portion of the screen.”

Naturally, you need internet access to make this work. But if you’re already on the internet, why would you need a special disc to interact with your friends while watching a movie? Couldn’t you partner with existing social networks (*cough* Twitter *cough*) to have folks engage while watching films online?

McBride goes on to write about how Hollywood execs are planning ways to allow folks to store their movies online and move them around easily from their phone to their TV. Ok, that would be useful, but we saw that coming (yawn). Oh, and there’s “a consortium of studios, retailers and consumer-electronics companies called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem” tirelessly working on this “issue.” Translation: DRM. And nope, Apple Inc. is not included in that mix. Hrmm.

More 3D, Holograms and Food: Oh My

To lure folks back into theaters, there will also be more films created in the newer, hipper 3D. But we already knew that. Also, holograms may be embedded as part of the experience (think election night on CNN). That could be a neat novelty, but I can’t really see that drastically changing “the way we watch.”

McBride concludes with a tidbit about how movie theaters will now also increasingly serve different kinds of food and beverages. It may just be the death of popcorn as we know it. Excuse me while I refill my bowl.

[photo: flickr/ChazWags]

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