IMHO the introduction of cheaper video having the direct effect of causing the decline of film will have the similar social effect of grocery stores vs. grow your own food, cars vs. carriages, air conditioning vs. getting out of the house, equal opportunity employment vs. discrimination.
These things change the feel of the environment.
Things are gained. And things are lost.
Deal with it or take Prozac over it.
Preservationists are fools.
First, I think the next two decades are going to be very weird due to the global financial crisis, so how things will be after that fetid pig has passed through the python is likely incalculable.
Second, here's the "film as entertainment" aspect from a critical time management issue: there will remain 24hrs in a day, as workplace efficiency increases society has a choice to either perform more productive activity with the same amount of discretionary leisure time - or - forego additional productive activity and increase discretionary leisure time.
The latter is basically cramming in more goofing off.
With digital film the cost barriers come down, the content volume increases, and the average quality decreases. Kinda like when the Berlin wall came down all the cheap Eastern block autos started polluting up Western Germany.
Third, now as economic efficiencies increase consumers should have better control over determining their soon to be streaming content as it is progressively commoditized as we see in NetFix's et al. $X/month programs.
There's just going to be more of that in the future.
Feature entertainment expenses will become utility payments just like cable TV.
So the trick is going to be developing some metric for consumers to consistently demand your product, because I can totally see how content providers are just gonna provide token compensation for your "no-one-cares-if-you-ever-made-it-to the-party" feature.
Premiums and revenue streams for content providers only happen for those in demand.
It costs content distributors just as much to send 90min of sh!t down the bandwidth pipe as it does gold.
As always, the distributors have both the providers and consumers by the curlies.
And I imagine that in a hundred years humanity (should it survive that long) will be recording and documenting every GD moment of our entire existence, no matter how mundane, and from a hundred different perspectives.
Every individual's documented existance will be stored according to copyright laws (a hundred years after our death, maybe) then auctioned off or deleted.
Your life = your grandparent's garage full of sh!t collected over a lifetime that the grand kids get to haul to the curb when they croak.
Howzat for doom and gloom?!
