The Extra-Large, Ultra-Small Medium By JODI KANTOR October 30, 2005 ON Monday morning, news networks were breathlessly covering two entirely different hurricanes. The first blew off the screen in all its fury, droplets speeding by, stop signs spinning, palm fronds flying and strands of soaked hair clinging to correspondents' foreheads. Debris clattered down deserted streets, and the wind screamed from a growl to a whistle and back again. The second storm was much tamer: palm trees swayed, but with something that looked more like stop-motion animation than deadly natural force. Mostly it looked like a foggy, soundless gray blur. Both hurricanes were Wilma, but one was the large-screen, plasma version; the other belonged to a mobile phone with a screen about one-twentieth the size of the first. One was affixed to a wall; the other could roam all over New York, on the subway, at a playground, in a coffee shop. Technology tends to shrink. Hulking mainframes begat slim laptops; boxy mobile phones and digital cameras have dematerialized into silvery credit cards. But something curious is happening to television: it's simultaneously growing gigantic and minuscule, stretching across living room walls at the same time it slips into pockets. People can brag about their 60-inch plasma screens and their palm-size nanocasters in the same breath. For now, television may still mostly be a medium-size medium. Plenty of bedrooms and doctors' offices still have 20-inch sets - and depending on picture quality and where the viewer sits, those screens can be impressively clear. But there is a growing fetish for televisions on the far ends of the size spectrum. Huge, crystalline displays, once the province of wealthy A/V geeks and Hollywood executives, have dropped so far in price that they are within reach of everyday people. And the same audience can buy televisions the size of candy bars. The newest Apple iPods can be loaded with television shows, and nearly every major cellphone carrier is building television capability (live broadcasts, on-demand programming, or both) into its devices, hoping that Americans will embrace the feature the way they did the cameras planted in phones a few years ago. It seems a little silly to call any one of these devices televisions. The big ones are home theaters, intended just as much for DVD watching and video-game-playing as for catching "Law & Order." The small ones are variously communications devices, music players, hard drives and cameras. But there is another problem with the common name: the two sizes of televisions make for such a different viewing experience that they almost seem like two separate media altogether. In a few years the extra-extra-extra large and ultra-ultra-ultra tiny televisions may come to seem like distant ancestral cousins, bound by a common genealogy and little else. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/arts/television/30kant.html?ex=1288324800&en=0a0f7278f9d70c84&ei=5090 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.