Cinema vs Tv

When it comes to TV vs Cinema, the discussion usually focuses around the technical characteristics of the two mediums, but to reduce the entire issue to this, is to entirely miss the point.
We will not say much about this, since these are very all known facts, namely that home entertainment is rapidly catching up with public theaters, when it comes to the quality of the presented image. We will only say that regardless of the high definition tv revolution and home cinema equipment, the two images presented will never be comparable, because of the simple reason that no one, or all most no one, has a wall the size of a cinema screen on which to project a movie.
But the essence of the issues is not about technicalities, it is about something else, something much more important, and that is the context. TV or home cinema has a totally different context than cinema, and the difference consists in what we may call “respect”. When you see a movie at home, on a dvd, you can always pause it or break it for every reason. In other words, at home, you are the master of the picture taking place on the screen, and for this reason most people will treat it like one treats a slave. On the big screen, on the other hand, you cannot pause the film for any reason, and your phone has to be switched off. If you miss a scene, there is no way you can rewind it, as you ca do on a dvd, so you have to pay full attention every second of the film. If you are seeing a move on the tv, you may at some point of it be bored and so get tempted to change the channel, which is exactly what most people do: they get bored and change the channel. Or the change the channel to skip the commercials and they forget to come back because their attention was caught by something else. In a theatre you can never change the channel, because there is no other channel to change to. One other thing, which we consider to be significant, is that when you have paied the ticked, you automatically get a dose of respect towards the movie. And it is not just about the money. The whole act of going to the cinema involves an effort which makes you think: if I have did this, this must be worth my respect
But the most important thing, the one that definitely sets the cinema so high above the seeing-a-movie-at-home experience that those two will never be in the same dimension, is the the fact that seeing a move in a theatre is a social experience. Of course, you see the movie through your own eyes, but the fact that there are many other eyes seeing it with you definitely has an impact on the way you perceive the movie. Is there something in the home experience that can match the end of the movie applause of two hundred people, some of them crying but all of them full of admiration, most of it coming from the movie that has just ended, but a considerable part of it coming from the people around them? The answer is no, and it will remain no as long as cinema will mean seeing the movie in a public place. If, on the other hand, some one will want many people in his home to watch a movie together, then, if the number is big enough, his home is no longer a home but a public place, a theatre.