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173 CONCLUSION: DIGITAL FUTURES Digital delivery not only affects the economic models of the movie industry but also promotes an on-demand culture, in which the practices of moviegoing and the perceptions of media culture are transformed. Movie viewers are now re-imagined as individualized and mobile, able to watch practically anywhere or anytime they wish, while having access to aspects of film culture—such as film festivals and art-house movies—that have in the past been available only in specific locations. In this sense, platform mobility seems to be an extension of models of active spectatorship that have informed both media scholarship and industry discourse. Many of these questions about mobility, personalization , and fragmentation were addressed in a comedy sketch about the TV Hat, a baseball cap that could be converted into a mobile personal theater, on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. The TV Hat, a product marketed on late-night television , allowed users to tuck an iPod or iPhone into a pocket inside a baseball cap with a giant brim. Users could then lower side blinders and a magnifying lens, allowing them to become “immersed in a private multimedia entertainment zone.” The comedy segment showed Colbert trying on the cap and marveling , in an echo of the TV Hat advertisement, that the hat provided “a motion picture experience absolutely anywhere”; viewers watching the segment saw a stock image of the interior of a movie palace, suggesting that mobile video now offers the full sensory pleasures of seeing movies on the big screen. Cutting back to the advertisement, we see a range of possible uses for the hat: a woman tanning on the beach, a man exercising in the gym, a traveler sitting in the airport, and a commuter stuck in traffic (presumably in the back of a taxi), all locations associated with boredom and forced waiting. Colbert’s satirical commentary on the TV Hat served not merely as an opportunity to send up a genuinely silly product—the TV Hat was widely mocked in tech blogs such as Wired and Gizmodo—but also as a sharp critique of other forms of personalized entertainment.1 Seizing on the image of the woman tanning on the beach, Colbert joked that he enjoyed hearing the sounds of the ocean “while watching Hawaii 5–0.” And pointing out that the hat came in a range of colors, including “camouflage,” he added that a user could “watch TV while you’re hunting.” In both cases, portable television seems to take us away from the natural world of genuine experience, isolating us in a media bubble where 174 On-Demand Culture we are oblivious to our surroundings. While these comments reinforce a simplistic opposition between real and artificial experience, they also help to establish the ways in which portable media devices are often seen as supporting a culture defined by platform mobility, one in which normally private activities—such as watching television—encroach upon the public world and where users are constantly distracted by entertainment to the point that they neglect the people around them. Colbert’s slyest commentary was reserved for the ways in which the TV Hat, like other forms of platform mobility, would fit into family life, and he echoed the promotional discourse used to sell mobile devices. Initially noting that the side blinders would allow users to “focus on what matters most by blocking out unnecessary distractions, like your spouse or your children,” Colbert cut back to images from the advertisement depicting a father wearing a TV Hat while his daughter watches a living-room set and a husband wearing the hat in bed while his wife reads a book beside him. The TV Hat advertisement also seemed to imply that the hat could help to restore family harmony, allowing the father to “watch the game while kids watch cartoons,” phrasing that directly echoed imagery from UltraViolet and other digital delivery services. While it would be easy to dismiss the TV Hat as a quirky or misguided product marketed to insomniacs on late-night television, Colbert’s observations about the advertisement helped to highlight how the hat fit into wider desires and fears about personal media technologies and their relationship to a culture marked by fragmented and individualized media consumption practices. But the privatized mobility of the TV Hat isn’t the full story when it comes to our emerging on-demand culture. Instead, despite the proliferation of smaller screens, digital delivery also reinforces a number of traditional...

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