HD! Blu-Ray! 4K! Ultra HD Blu-ray!…Holy Sh*&*t!…or simply “blah blah blah”…
Here’s the honest truth, for most people it doesn’t really matter how good something can look. Sure they will take it, but what REALLY matters most is how convenient and effortlessly they can absorb it.
4K vs. OK
There is an increasingly mounting wall separating those who will go through the relative tediousness of things like opening a case, taking a disk out of said case, opening the disk drive, and sitting through unskippable previews and menus, and those who will just hit “stream” at a much lower quality without getting off the couch.
Physical Stuff Is a Drag
This is why YouTube and Netflix, and other streaming options, dominate as our entertainment platforms of choice, even for users before 4K or who still don’t have the monthly bandwith for the top resolution in their downloads. If you are a millennial or Generation Z, this is of course preaching to the choir.
This isn’t confined to consuming films and television, watching folks play video games is a legit thing. It’s, gasp, mainstream! That is instead of playing those video games for ourselves! This would sound like some sort of witchcraft or blasphemy years ago, but here we are. Who can be bothered with keeping an up to date gaming rig or tweaking settings? Having folks over to play games? Weak-sauce,; if want to play so bad, we can totally just meet up online and forgo the effort, or pants. Right?
What ever is the path of least resistance is the one most people will take most of the time.
Just look at the turn of the century progression, in terms of consuming Hollywood moving-pictures (yes, they used to call them that! Silly primitives!). When we went from VHS to DVD in 1997, it was touted for its mind blowing quality. Heck, the DVD picture quality was previewed on VHS tapes through showing explosions. One had to wonder how you can show one thing on another thing that is apparently so archaic. Truth is, didn’t matter if it was the same exact quality as it’s predecessor. A DVD did not have to be tediously and slowly rewound or fast forwarded. It could be played in small mobile players, on your PC, and was much smaller for packing and transporting. You could carry dozens of films with you on a trip in the same case you carried your music CDs (remember those?) It was convenient and we ate it up like a greasy buffet having a half-off special.
Looks Amazing, But Can’t Be Bothered To Leave Couch
When Blu-Ray arrived just over a decade later, in 2008, it was also touted as the biggest game changer ever, assuming you had the hardware to take advantage of the benefits. It murdered the competition, HD-DVD, because it was playable on the PlayStation 3 console, which was… you guessed it… convenient! Regardless, its adoption was and continues to be a relative fraction of what DVD was. Compared to what came before, it was not more convenient, it was more pretty. The cost to benefit ratio ain’t for everyone.
Meanwhile, streaming flew by like it entered hyperspace, and stabbed video rental stores such as Blockbuster while they kept their heads in the sand (exposing their bodies for said stabbing). Who could be bothered with driving to a store, going to a counter, and having to gasp, return it? Your grandfather, that’s who.
Who hasn’t chosen to watch something else online at a shamefully lower resolution, rather than wait for the bigger download, go that physical media rout, or get their actual bums to a movie theater? Speaking of which, fewer and fewer people go to the movies these days for that very reason. The spectacle and social aspect has to merit the effort.
Sure, if you want to avoid spoilers or have a hot date, it’s more worthy of your time, but even that is probably based on avoiding the creep factor in inviting someone home early on.. .but more important, the need to tidy up your living space, that is not convenient.
Like Settling For Kraft Dinner, We Often Make Compromises
So here we are, where things get prettier every day, but ultimately most of us will flow like water to the first thing that we drift upon, as long as it satisfies us with the least effort used up.
This certainly applies to things like photography as well. Most of the time our cell phone cameras with internal memory are good enough, not to mention extremely convenient as they are on hand and can upload on the fly! Even if we have a big bulky DSLR in a bag somewhere that takes much more impressive stills.
Not into TV, films or video games? Just download a good book to read or song to listen to, it’s so deliciously convenient. There will always be two tiers, those who prefer the best your senses can get (think Ultra Blu-Ray) and those who are good with what is at hand.
But hey, no judgement, merely an observation that there are more and more of only one of those camps as days go by. We also have less room for “stuff”, especially as we binge more and more…
