After I watched The Line for the first time, I re-watched it last night with Mrs. Tuned In—on TV. TiVo, for you non-cultists, now allows you to search for and stream YouTube videos directly to your TV. (I don’t know if the entire database is available, but TiVo touts “millions” of videos, and having tried to search for several obscure clips, I have yet to stump it.)
I can’t decide yet whether watching Internet video on the big screen enhances the experience or defeats it. It definitely lends itself to group viewing better than hunching around a laptop, but part of the aesthetic of online video is its scale and intimacy, which you necessarily lose watching several feet away on a big screen. (You also lose most of the social features like the comments—though some would say that’s a feature, not a bug—and searching using the remote is much slower than it is with a keyboard.)
In general, I’d say YouTube-on-TV is best suited for those productions that are most TV-like to begin with (e.g., The Line). A clip that has poor video quality to begin with will, blown up on my 37-inch screen, look like watching cellphone video through a magnifying glass. (The Line wasn’t crystal clear, but that is partly the result of my getting used to HD; the quality was at least close to watching standard-def TV on TiVo.) It’s a good medium for watching several minisodes in a row, but it’s pointless for watching something like Dramatic Chipmunk, and not only because the video takes far longer to search for than to load.
And yet there’s an appeal to watching more-amateur videos this way too, just a different one from streaming them on a laptop. Where watching someone’s YouTube video on a computer is like reading someone’s diary, watching it on a big screen is like seeing their home movies.
Of course, YouTube-on-TiVo isn’t just about amateur movies, or straight-to-Web minisodes. It also offers all the myriad, yet-uncaught copyright violations that YouTube the website does. For now, I have to imagine that only so many people are even using this TiVo feature (or Apple TV, or other technologies). But if the only barriers are distribution, bandwidth and screen resolution—all of which will improve eventually—the difference between online video and TV gets that much smaller. One assumes that TV executives, and their lawyers, have at least started to think about that.
But like I said, I have no idea if anyone in the world besides me is even watching online video this way (I barely started using it myself). Are any other TiVo or Apple TV users out there doing this, or do you still watch online video online the way God intended?