Overnight News: Finding the future of television – over-the-air and without-sound.

Since the advent of flat-screen HD-TVs, I’ve been telling my clients that the future of common spaces in the home is the sports bar: Not one big screen, but one big one with two or three smaller ones.

That joke’s on me, as TVs proliferate in our house. For now we have two glaring – but only one blaring – in the living room. On Saturday, Miss Chioux and I didn’t watch Nashville reruns on one screen while college football was painting the room in pretty sunlit colors on another – over-the-air and without-sound.

Normally on weekends I watch golf for TV that I’m not watching – TV that’s a window to look up to from a screen more-actively-engaged – but football was a flower show on every network. A big effusion of indifference to COVID fear-porn, too, even though sunlit events always end up disappointing the death collectors. Cathleen saw a little bit of the Wisconsin game, noting all the missing masks and the supreme whiteness of the people in the grandstands, compared to the people on the field.

And I’m glad for the football fans regardless of the knots of hypocrisy they have to gnaw through to get to a good time, but it remains that the future of fun is more private that public.

Those colors didn’t kill the cinema, nor did the virus: It was dying, anyway. But the virus has hastened long-standing trends away from commonly-shared spaces generally, while the TV and more-interactive screens take away many of the rewards and most of the drawbacks of going to the mall or the stadium or the cineplex. Why would I want T-Rex when I’ve got TV?

So here’s the future I don’t share with my clients: HDTV has a scarcity problem, amidst all its abundance, and a multiplexing problem. The solution will be home-level TV – all input sources available at all destination TV-monitors.

The big screens will be really big: One screen, not three or four, with a big window for the show you’re watching, smaller ones for the things you’re monitoring – or for the video game you’re playing with Bluetooth audio to your headset.

There’s more, but I won’t scare you too much. The future of TV is any big, empty wall – but the real future of television is fabric – everywhere!

In other news:

Roger Simon: Chatting With Larry Elder: The Mystery of California.

Nick Arama: Now This Is Joy.

Frontpage Mag: Biden Surrendered to the Taliban; The GOP Must Not Surrender to Biden: Impeach the president, court martial the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mark Steyn: Defeat and Dishonesty.