My year of maximum computer expenditure, adjusted for inflation, was 1984. At that date, computers often cost as much as automobiles. Over the years, I have experienced the law of diminishing returns, as applied to computers. New uses of computers were not so compelling that I had to do them that year, and in two or three years, the price had fallen considerably.

Here is an article I turned up, with a chart indicating how close to the screen you have to be, in order to tell the difference between different grades of digital television sets. We are beginning to reach the point of limits derived from human vision.

http://www.techradar.com/us/news/television/ultra-hd-everything-you-need-to-know-about-4k-tv-1048954
http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html

As against that, video compression will continue to become more efficient, as more and faster processors are employed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding

I think video compression and decompression hardware will get better and cheaper, faster than physical cable-laying will. Movie images really don’t change very much from one frame to the next, because they are pictures of things which are themselves mostly unchanging at some level. I have a copy of the screenplay of Woody Allen’s Play It Again Sam, illustrated with a thousand production stills, ie. every six seconds. Looking at this book, it is easy to see just how continuous the visual content of a movie is. If you succeed in finding the right level at which to compress moving pictures of these objects, you get the kind of drastic compression which occurs when bitmaps of text are OCR’d. Let us say, for purposes of discussion, that you can keep bits of image in play for six seconds, by transforming them in various ways. In that case, a movie becomes the equivalent of a thousand images, and, say, fifty or a hundred megabytes. I am talking about a level of compression technology which shades over into animation technique. Moore’s law operates in this kind of technology.

The business of laying cables is not going through any kind of comparable transition. Laying a cable is pretty much like it was ten years ago. A telephone lineman running a cable jumps over a fence and comes face to face with a German Shepherd who thinks it’s his turf, and various complications ensue… progress in cable-laying tends to be slow and laborious.

Movie image quality for the sake of image quality is something of a minority taste. Another aspect of diminishing returns is that an image is good enough when it conveys its meaning, when it doesn’t detract from the story. A certain type of technology enthusiast gets himself trapped into the false position of claiming that any hardcover book is better than any paperback, regardless of their respective contents, just because the quality of physical construction of the hardcover book is greater.

There is a certain type of person who is so proud of his new video hardware that he falls into a similar error, thinking that a high resolution copy of current Hollywood product is better, than a low resolution copy of a historically significant film from the 1930’s. Suich films, I might add, were usually made in black-and-white. Color film was a relative latecomer, and a lot of the great directors, like a lot of the great photographers, had become accustomed to the technique of managing tones in black and white, using color filters to emphasis different elements. Color film was superficially lush, but it did not have the same potentialities of dramatic control.

Another point is that, in the largest sense of the word, something like streaming video is not altogether new. There were movie theaters, and television sets in 1984, and, around a university, there were apt to be all kinds of informal showings of films in classrooms or meetings of student groups. These forms of moving pictures were simply not as flexible in use as computer-based video has become. Computers have been assimilating media which already existed.