Streaming can never replace cinema

First of all, streaming is a luxury only Europe, Asia, and North America enjoy. For now. If you live in Uganda, then you know that most of us have neither the data nor the Internet speeds required to stream anything.

If anything is going to kill cinema, it is torrenting (downloading from torrents, or pirating) because we do that rather frequently these days. And yet, even that baffles me. Why would streaming or torrenting kill cinema? Who in their right mind chooses to watch a movie at home on their small screen over enjoying it in the cinema?

Now, obviously,  cinema is expensive. A ticket costs Shs 24,000. If you include snacks, that figure skyrockets to 60,000 or even Shs 70,000. If you can’t afford to see movies on the big screen every weekend, I understand your predicament.

That being said, if you have the money and you love movies, I cannot wrap my head around this notion of choosing your laptop or flat-screen or, God forbid, your smartphone over the glorious experience of cinema.

On a side note, people who watch anything on their phones are barely human in my opinion. How can you hope to fully appreciate the acting, production values, and musical composition of a movie from the perspective of a five-inch screen?

What in the name of all that is holy, is wrong with you? Again, if you can’t afford a TV or a computer, obviously you have to make do with your phone. But there are people without those financial restrictions but still choose to severely handicap their viewing experience.

Let me nip one particularly asinine argument in the bud right now: home entertainment technology has advanced by leaps and bounds over the years. People don’t watch television quite like they used to a decade or two ago. That being said, I don’t care how many HDs you have in your flat-screen TV, how large your speakers are or how soft the chairs in your home might be.

Put simply and politely, your expensive home theater system is dog fecal matter compared to the cinema. Unless you have an actual theater in your home, that 72-inch flat-screen can never match the viewing experience delivered by a projection the size of a small building. In 3D. The cinema is a magical place, especially if it is a good cinema, not one of those crowded, poorly structured things with a ridiculous screen that you sometimes encounter in Uganda.

A decent cinema will change the way you think about movies. We need to forget this nonsense of streaming replacing the movie theater.

SOURCE : The Observer