There are many things that contributed to the DVD boom of the last six or eight years. The movie industry deserved its free digital money, just as the music industry did in the 1980s. The movie industry was even smarter, keeping the price point low and adding even more potent special features.

One appeal of the DVD that is sometimes overlooked is the way it resolved a huge problem in home movie-watching in the 1980s and 1990s, namely the violence that was done to most movies in the process. Since movies didn’t fit on TV screens well, folks originally got a cropped picture (or, worse, a panned-and-scanned one). It doesn’t get talked about much, but this was an aesthetic outrage almost without historical parallel. Since photo composition is so central to the filmmaking art, a similar example in any other medium is difficult to formulate—can you imagine a huge percentage of novels consumed minus their adjectives?

Anyway, I think it’s possible that the DVD’s fast rise is at least partially due to an underappreciated feeling on the part of home viewers that they weren’t getting the whole picture, so to speak. (I’m not saying a widescreen is intrinsically better; just that if a movie was filmed that way it should be seen that way. “The Sopranos” isn’t any better once it started being shown in a widescreen format. You can compose perfectly well for a nearly square screen.)

Still, while we are now seeing that whole picture, we are not seeing it with the force of a large screen in a theater, which is another perhaps unarticulated desire on the part of even casual movie watchers. But as very large flat screens become a routine home product, this may change as well. A recent WSJ ($) story detailed that, with LCD set sales increasing by 75 percent a year it’s suddenly become difficult for makers to distinguish their screens by quality or price. (The digital conversion in 2009 is going to accelerate this changeover.) As prices drop, 50-inch TVs, which in an average living room pack a substantive cinematic punch, are quite affordable, making it now not just the place where you can see a movie in its appropriate aspect ratio, but also in a setting that will, in an almost subconscious way, fulfill an unspoken need on the part of consumers that previously could be obtained only in a theater.

And these days, of course, the movie theater has become a zoo. (Before a film I saw recently at a megaplex, we were shown a commercial that featured a cartoon piece of snot in an old west setting being run out of town by a sheriff named “Mucinex” or somesuch. The theater showed it twice before the film—and then had it blaring again on an oversized screen in the lobby.) Given a scenario in which a couple or a family can a) stay in and watch a movie in superb and powerful reproduction at home in peace and quiet with popcorn at hand or b) pay $20 and $40+, respectively, before snacks to schlep to a cacophonous environment, be bombarded with commercials, experience poor projection, and have someone texting in the seat next to them, the choice isn’t even close.

This ineluctable process will have three plain effects: a) increase the pressure for day and date release of film and DVDs; b) accelerate the industry’s moves toward 3D and IMAX and the like, just to maintain reasons for actually traveling to a theater; and c) continue the bifurcation of the movie experience, into an adult one with quality movies seen at home and a younger, more action-oriented one that is experienced in ever-more advanced public spheres.