Mobile Video

Recently in a conversation with my mom, she was telling me about the recent cell phone boom in India.More people are getting cell phones, and that's great. Businesses and the whole economy of that country can benefit by more people being connected. The interesting aside to the growth, however, is that because of it more and more people in India are using their new cell phones to consume media. While here in the US we may have a TV and an iPod too, that definitely isn't the case for most people living there, and televisions are much more rare. So what do Indians do instead? Gather round the ol' cell phone and watch a translation of Friends!

Mobile video is popular here too, whether it be on an iPod or on a cell phone. People are consuming more and more media on the go, and more and more media on small screens and stock earbud headphones. Mendel had brought up the point in an earlier entry that he disliked this because it results in people never having any time to just "be" since they can watchSouth Park during all their free time on the bus, and although i agree with him, I also dislike this new trend for a different reason , and David Lynch seems to agree with me :P

It seems to me that as more people start watching their television and movies on smaller screens, the people producing that media might start having to compensate for that with a different style of production. The music industry has compensated for the fact that 50% of iPod owners use stock earbuds with the "loudness wars," which are virtually eliminating dynamic range in new music and can ruin it in extreme cases. Are we going to start seeing new TV shows doing something similar? Are we going to see cinematography with more close-ups and detail shots so people watching on an iPod nano screen can actually see what's going on? Are directors even going to bother with small details and good sets if most people aren't going to see them anyway?

I myself have never watched a TV show on my iPod, and maybe used the stock earbuds for about 1 day (mostly to advertise my new iPod owner status). Are these things sufficient for anyone reading this? I guess I maybe don't understand since I like to consume media in the best environment possible, or else I don't think it is worth it. The director intended movies to be viewed on a screen the size of a room, and while watching them on a television is acceptable, I just will not have the same experience on a cell or iPod, period. Same with music, if I can't hear everything that's in the song, why even bother?

Maybe I'm just a media perfectionist, but I'm sure that there are others like me, and we're getting the short end of the stick.