Who watches the Watchmen?

The iPhone could be a real threat to the DS and PSP, but even within the casual gaming space, handheld and console gaming are two different experiences. There's a reason movie tickets and big HDTVs are selling great, people love huge screens. Also, the all-in-one device concept works for the iPhone because for handhelds compactness and convenience is everything, but there's enough space in the house under the TV for multiple devices. People have been predicting the death of game consoles since the early 90s when home PC sales took off, but now most PC game customers and developers have migrated to consoles. Playing both movies and games helped PS2 but it didn't help PS3. If the two-in-one concept works again, it'll probably come from a combined OnLive and Netflix device or service which won't come from Apple. Finally, Apple TV bombed.

In summary, Apple may very well conquer a big swath of handheld gaming, but there's no sign that they're about to enter, much less conquer, console gaming.

I keep wondering when the Good Enough phenomenon will hit movie theater projection systems. Currently, Hollywood is making a slow, painfully expensive transition from film projection, which has fairly low hardware cost but very high media cost, to 3 DLP chip digital projection, which has nearly zero media cost but extremely high hardware cost. Hollywood is going from one expensive projection system to another because they insist that picture quality only ever go up. But movie theaters have already installed a cheap, dim, LCD projector next to every one of their Hollywood-approved projectors to display preshow ads.

So far, about 450 screens in the US also use these dim preshow projectors to show an alternative content series called Fathom Events that includes independent movies, live news events, and live opera. Fathom is not yet big, but it's in mainstream theaters like Regal, AMC and Cinemark. Interestingly, the theater chains own Fathom and the creators of content are nobodies compared to Hollywood, so theaters may be getting a larger cut of the ticket than Hollywood lets them have. Fathom is the only theatrical system in which both the hardware and the media are low cost, so why hasn't its popularity exploded?

This raises a question I've had for a long time: If the consumer has a gaming PC or game console, does it take less bandwidth to send them a CG movie in polygon form or in MPEG/H.264 form? GTA4 on Xbox 360 is an enormous game that fits into 7 GB. If you made a 720P 60FPS H.264 movie of a fairly thorough playthrough of GTA4 including cutscenes, how many GB would that be? If TV/movie studios want to send an entire TV series in HD to customers over the internet, they might save a lot of bandwidth fees if they could send it as polygons instead of MPEG. Of course, the TV series could only be created by artists at computer desks, not by actors on sets, so bandwidth capping would give game companies an advantage over Hollywood on the internet. I doubt even Pixar or Dreamworks would send their movies as game console-ready polygons because they're used to having nearly infinite memory and rendering time.

Ultimately, Hollywood will have to do some major lobbying and investing with the telecoms so that every home can affordably stream real HD video over the internet.