Why Flat Video Will Feel Like Black and White

The future of media won’t be what we say we want. It will be what we actually want.

Most media consumption is driven by the older parts of our brain, the parts that don’t explain themselves. If you can figure out what those parts want, you can explain how we got here. And you can guess what comes next.

Fidelity

People want media that feels closer to real life. The clearest evidence of this is video.

In the 1960s, we switched from black and white to color, and never went back. But color isn’t free. It costs more to produce, transmit, and store. We pay anyway. Ask people why and they’ll say color is “richer,” or that black and white is “boring.” Keep asking and you get somewhere simpler. Color is closer to how we actually see the world. That’s what people want from media.

All else equal, people prefer media that’s closer to reliving the experience themselves. It’s what pushes resolution and frame rates higher and higher.

By this logic, everyone should be wearing a VR headset by now instead of scrolling TikTok. They aren’t, and the reason is the second principle.

Convenience

People want media that fits into what they’re already doing. We’re lazy, and this shapes more than people admit.

The bar for overcoming inconvenience is high. Blu-ray had better picture quality than Netflix for years, and people picked the worse one anyway. Streaming fit what they were already doing. Driving to Best Buy, buying a disc, loading a player, that was friction nobody wanted.

But when friction is equal, the richer medium wins.

Color replaced black and white because watching one is no more work than watching the other. You don’t need special glasses. You just look.

It took time to get there. When color required a special TV in the 1950s and early 1960s, adoption crawled. Once sets became affordable, the switch became absolute. Nobody has seriously proposed going back.

Podcasts are the cleanest example of a medium built around convenience. You put in headphones and you’re set for hours, while doing something else. That last part is what makes them work. Podcasts slot into the gaps in your day that nothing else could fill.

A new medium wins when it offers more without asking for more.

The future

The endpoint of visual media is fixed, because human vision is fixed. There are only so many things our eyes can do. Once a medium does all of them, there’s nowhere left to go.

Today’s video is missing three of them.

The first is field of view. Video lives inside a rectangle. Real life doesn’t. It fills about 200 degrees of your vision. A TV fills about 30. The Sphere in Las Vegas works because it wraps around you the way a room does.

The second is stereo depth. Your eyes see slightly different images, and your brain uses the gap to place things in space. Flat video gives both eyes the same image. Your brain guesses depth from shadows and perspective. It works, but you’re not really there.

The third is motion parallax. When you move, things up close shift more than things far away. Your brain reads this as proof the world is real. Video doesn’t do it. Move your head and the screen stays put.

A medium that does all three is indistinguishable from being there. It is to flat video what color was to black and white.

The catch is the second principle. A richer medium only wins when it’s at least as convenient as what it replaces.

That’s why the change is starting out of home. In a venue, the setup is someone else’s problem. You buy a ticket and walk in. Domes take this furthest. There’s nothing to put on. You sit down and look.

It will take time. Color did. The first color TVs cost about half the price of a new car, and people watched in black and white for decades because the alternative was expensive and inconvenient.

Then sets got cheap, the shows got made, and the switch became absolute. The same thing is happening now, starting in domes.

One day, watching flat video will feel like watching black and white. It will still work. We just won’t choose it.