Entertainment Tonight

So it's been a while since I blogged, so I'll do this one for Justin.

Let's start off with a supposition that may or may not be true. You work 9-5, but you have enough free time in the evenings to do something. But what is that something? If you were growing up in the 1970s and even into the 1980s, the most common evening activity was watching television.

You didn't have much control over what you were watching. If you had TV prior to cable, you might get 4 channels over the air. If you had cable, then you might have 20-30 channels, the numbers of channels growing as the years passed. However, you had to watch the content live, at least until the advent of the VCR.

The VCR allowed entertainment to expand in several ways. First, it allowed you to record programs that you could watch later. The technology wasn't terribly sophisticated. You could only set the time and duration. The VCR was, as a group, poorly designed, mostly because usability was not something anyone thought about. Get engineers to design something and they'll design what's easiest for them to build, not what's easiest for the users to use.

More importantly, VCRs meant people could also buy and rent videotapes and a whole new industry was born: renting movies. For a time, if you wanted to watch movies, you had to go to the theater. If you were lucky, the movie was popular enough that it would show up on TV and you could watch it there, filled with commercials. When cable came around, channels were devoted to showing movies all the time (HBO, Showtime, Cinemax).

Movies at home were wonderful. Sure VHS tape quality was poor, and the more you watched, the worse the tape became--more snowy, more jittery, but at least you could watch it in the comfort of your own home. This was especially important for parents who lack time to go out and watch movies. Prior to this, going out would require a babysitter to stay a few hours. These days, the paranoia about having other people look after your children seems to have pressed parents to stay home more.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and the entertainment has changed, but mostly in technology. By 2000, videotapes were being replaced by DVDs that were smaller, less resistant to wear, and much higher quality than VHS. Instead of getting DVDs at a local movie store, companies like Netflix were offering DVDs by mail.

DVDs also liberated televisions. Shows like LOST couldn't be made without DVDs (although that's changing now). LOST has a plot so complex that it requires understanding shows that preceded it. Admittedly, soap operas also had a similar structure, but most fans seem happy getting other folks to fill them in on details. There also wasn't a huge puzzle which fans would scrutinize each episode for.

If you look at programs from the 1960s, they had to create one-off shows with few references to past episodes because if a person missed it, they would be, well, lost. Now, fans who miss entire seasons can buy or rent DVDs and catch up on whole seasons, commercial free. Some argue that commercial-free is the only way to watch television.

Netflix meant you didn't have to run to your local video store to get content. You could get it sent to you via mail and return it via mail. You didn't have to feel pressure getting it back to the video store in 2 days or risk getting fined. Netflix charged a montly rate and only controlled how many videos you could have out at any time.


Technology has pushed the concept further. The problem with the original Netflix model was the delay between ordering a movie and getting it. If you didn't feel like watching a movie, you had to return it and wait for another. There was a lack of instant gratification.

Fortunately, Netflix could rely on the biggest game changer of them all. The Internet. Of course, the US lags behind countries like Japan and Korea in sheer bandwidth, but the bandwidth has become good enough to stream videos (in Japan/Korea, you can download videos in minutes rather than hours, so streaming is less of a big deal). That means you get all the benefits of every technology. If you don't like the video you're watching, watch another one.

But the point is this: we're still watching movies and by extension television.

What are the alternatives? Some alternatives are simply what people watch. A subculture of Americans are heavy into anime. Anime has never been widely adopted by the popular media and is the closest thing we have to counterculture entertainment.

There are video games. Video games have been a staple of entertainment almost as long as VCRs have been around.

With the Internet, there's surfing the web. You can watch movies on the Internet, or viral videos, or read articles of interest. You can play games on the Internet, chat on the Internet. The Internet (via web browsers and websites) allow you to devour information of all sorts, from politics to sports to cooking to photography to conspiracy theories to whatever. Still, it's not a very social thing to do. If you're hanging out with a significant other, surfing the Internet means you are doing your own thing. This isn't to say movies are all that social, but it's somewhat more social.

That leads me to the point of this entry. What are the next forms of entertainment? Why do we still gravitate to the entertainment choices we've always made. Why is it like so many other people's entertainment?

I don't have answers to this except that we have a herd mentality, whether we like to admit it or not.