>TV was expected to kill radio, which to a great extent it did. Heard any good dramas on the radio lately? Radio hasn't gone away but it sure took a hit.
Seen a good drama on TV lately? Me neither.
It's not TV killing radio or VCR killing TV or video killing the radio star. For me, it's the advertisements which have killed them all. Now with movies, TV and radio being all sequential media, you just can't skip them. In newspaper, you just flip the page. On the web, you install AdBlock on your Mozilla Firefox and you filter them as you like.
I still watch some TV, with remote close at hand and my finger trained on the mute button.
>DVD has had an exponentially larger impact. Not only don't you have to deal with showtime schedules, $5 popcorn, $4 soda, and patrons who chatter through the movie, answering their cell phones even, you actually get more on the DVD -- subtitles, deleted scenes, commentaries, etc.
...and you don't have to rewind them. Though (I was probably too early to have a DVD so early, by the end of '99) it still said on the box from the rentail (how's this for a new word?), "be kind, please rewind".
>There are still movies I want to experience in the theater. Maybe I just can't wait, or maybe I think it has to be seen on the big screen, or maybe I just want to get out of the house. But most of the time Netflix is just fine. Will movie theaters go away? No. But it's a crumbling model.
I still visit them once a year or so, on the average. Because their sound boxes are larger than mine, and so is the screen. I have almost given up, though, but I've learned the trick: I ask the lady at the box office when does the movie
really begin, to which I (surprise!) get an honest answer. And then I don't go in until about two minutes before that. Which spares me at least eight advertisements for other movies I'm not interested in at all (and would be negatively interested if I was forced to watch them).
Can't say anything about the newspapers, because these were the first luxury we gave up in Milosevic's times, and never regained the habit. I do pick up local freebie weeklies at the grocery, they usually have some useful stuff in there.
