There's been so much said about the coming of HDTV and a future filled with massive home theatre systems, but the reality has been that smaller screens, and I mean much smaller screens, have outpaced the larger in both sales and acceptance. In Japan, where widescreen HDTV sets were the standard years ago, there are already 78 million mobile users and they are quickly consuming a lot of media content on their handsets. Some report that there are trains full of people who are watching live broadcasts on their phones.

Other parts of the world may not be so far ahead, but the trend seems the same everywhere. Smaller is catching on. People want more content, faster and they want t take it with them where they go.

The growth of this market is staggering. Apple's iPhone sold a reported 700,000 units in its three day launch weekend and with its new lower price is well on its way to 2,000,000 units in circulation. Business Week said of Apple, "...the iPhone has the potential for adding a totally new, $10 billion-a-year business within just a few years."

There are over a billion cell phones sold each year, and most modern units include screens capable of playing games, showing video, reading ebooks and, in Japan, even manga, a $20 million industry which seems to triple each year. Major companies are scrambling to create content for this brave new mobile world. TOKYOPOP, who published my own World of Hartz manga, is already the leader in the mobile manga market in America, and it is a market that is growing rapidly.

Video sharing sites like Youtube are already striking deals with major mobile content providers to make their content available on the smaller screens. Youtube viewing comes standard on every iPhone. This could quickly grow larger than TV, and some companies are paying major money for good content licenses.

Where's it all going to go? Your guess is as good as mine. Only time will tell. I do remember, though, when I got my hands on my first Sony PSP, I had tons of ideas for creating exclusive manga or anime content for that little device. I even built a site for it. Less than a year later, an underground PSP manga market exploded. Who knows how big it will get on the iPhone.

Tags: iPhone, Sony PSP, Manga, movies

I was watching the movie Jurassic Park yesterday, not realizing that it is now 15 years old, when it dawned on me. Movies have really changed in just that short time. I'm not talking about some odd motion that older movies were all better. I am talking just about the way they look. I also don't mean to imply that the CG suddenly looks dated. Special FX done right in any era, look good forever.

What I'm talking about here is just how used to these modern digital movies I have become. Even movies which are still shot on 35mm film stock are often immediately scanned into the computer and the rest of the work is done there. Even though they retain that film look, having originated on 35, they don't look like older movies. You know how a 60's movie looks different to us? Not talking FX, just the film itself, the color, the grain etc. Film stocks get better, processes improve, things change. I had no idea, though, that they change so quickly.

Jurassic Park really looks...I don't know the word... filmy. It's not grainy or dirty and scratched like an old film. it is still very clean, but it looks very different than our current films, even by the same director such as War of the Worlds. The color is different. It just looks more film like than the movie of today, even those that are still shot on 35mm.

Thinking of film, I also noticed, since ILM did the visual FX on Jurassic Park, that Lucas had changed the name of his company from LucasFilm LTD. to Lucas Digital LTD. Now, of course, I had always known that he changed the company name, but I never really thought about it until now. Film is no longer a part of his vocabulary. He doesn't used it anymore and doesn't see a need to. The name of his company had to be changed because film has no place in it. Seems simple, but for some reason it stuck me as profound. This is years before he actually made his first all digital movie too.

I wonder what the future holds for directors who have no desire to switch over. On the DVD Bug, William Friedkin talks about the end of film. He doesn't seem to have the problem with it that other younger directors have expressed. Seeing how different Jurassic Park looked from modern movies, though, I could almost understand the apprehension. Well.. almost.

I, of course, will never make anything on film. I have absolutely no reason to consider it. Even if I ever do a live action project, which isn't anywhere in my plans at the moment, it would still be shot digitally. It would probably be for the web and mobile markets before I ever consider any big screen too. That's just my view.

Tags: movies, digital