BIG PICTURES.

The device was as elegant as an old cigarette case and not much larger than a child's palm. I was holding a video iPod, poised at the frontier of a new digital age, a new platform for movies, a new convenience that will annihilate old paradigms. Last spring and summer, when I visited a number of executives and tech guys in big-studio Hollywood, I kept hearing disdain for the mall cinemas and the multiplexes--the theatres in which most Americans see movies. And I heard a new mantra: "Content on demand--when you want it, where you want it, and how you want it." By the end of the summer, movies were beginning to flow into homes and portable devices through the Internet. In September, Apple began offering previously released Disney movies through its iTunes Store. I downloaded the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" onto my hard drive, then put it onto a video iPod. The screen was only two inches across.

If you are sitting down, the natural place for an iPod is in your lap; that way, your arms don't get tired. At that distance, however, I couldn't focus on the image. So I rested the iPod on my stomach. And there it sat, riding up and down every time I took a breath. I was on the Black Pearl, all right, standing on her foredeck like a drunken sailor as she plowed through heavy seas. The horizon line kept pitching and heaving, and I had trouble seeing much of anything. "Pirates" has lots of wide vistas and noisy tumult--a vast ocean under the dazzling sun and nighttime roughhousing in colonial towns, with deep-cleavaged prostitutes and toothless drunks. What I saw, mainly, was a looming ship the size of a twig, patches of sparkling blue, and a face or a skull flashing by. The interiors were as dark as caves. My ears, fed by headphones, were filled with such details as the chafing of hawsers and feet stomping on straw, but there below me Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom were duelling like two angry mosquitoes in a jar.

In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it. Of course, no one will ever be forced to look at movies on a pipsqueak display--at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen, or they'll transfer them to a big flat-screen TV. Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces, and they certainly will function that way for kids. According to home-entertainment specialists I spoke to in Hollywood, many kids are "platform agnostic"--that is, they will look at movies on any screen at all, large or small. Most kids don't have bellies, and they can pretzel their limbs into almost any shape they want, so they can get comfortable with a handheld device; they can also take it onto a school bus, down the street, into bed, cuddling it under the covers after lights-out.

The movies currently offered by Apple and other downloading services are the first trickles of a flood. Soon, new movies will come pouring through the Internet and perhaps through cable franchises as well, and people will look at them on screens of all sizes. For those of us who are not agnostics but fervent believers in the theatrical experience, this latest development in movie distribution is of more than casual interest.

The skeletons danced on shipboard; their bones looked like pieces of string dipped in Elmer's glue. With a groan, I tried to suppress memories of a camel train making its stately way across a seventy-foot-wide screen in "Lawrence of Arabia." On the iPod the camels would traverse my thumb. Where, I wondered, were movies going? Were they going any place good?

Talk of distributing movies over the Internet has been around for years, but it has sharpened in recent months as Hollywood has run into financial trouble. In the middle of the summer, the studios were clearly undergoing a contraction and what some even called a "panic." They laid off hundreds of employees; they made one of their periodic attempts to control runaway star salaries and production budgets, cancelling, for example, comedies with stars like Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller which were budgeted at more than a hundred million dollars. In the future, as writers, directors, and actors try to gain a better percentage of revenue derived from the Internet, labor disputes look inevitable.

At first glance, the cause of the problem was a little mysterious: domestic box-office, after a dip in 2005, was up again (and has remained up), and overseas box-office was healthy, too. But theatrical grosses actually account for less than twenty per cent of total movie revenues. Despite the to-do in the media every weekend over what's No. 1 and what's No. 2, and how the take for "Crushed Knees 3" compares with that for "Crushed Knees 2," the theatres bring in much less money than other revenue streams--sales to television in all its forms (free, cable, pay-per-view) and rentals and sales of DVDs, which make up half of total movie revenues. Not that the theatres are financially unimportant: in general, the more noise made about a movie when it opens, the bigger the eventual return from the ancillary markets, which is one reason the studios still contend to be the weekend box-office champ. In crude terms, the theatres can be seen as a branding device and a stimulant to DVD sales. In August, when Tom Cruise's production deal with Paramount Pictures, Viacom's film division, ended, Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, mentioned Cruise's controversial public behavior, which, he said, hurt the box-office for Paramount's summer release of the third "Mission: Impossible" movie. What Redstone didn't say, as Edward Jay Epstein reported in the Financial Times, was that Cruise had a deal with Paramount which gave him an enormous share of the DVD revenue on the movie. "M:i:III" cost a hundred and fifty million dollars to make, and its worldwide theatrical gross was almost four hundred million. But Paramount realized that after the theatres took their cut, and the production, promotion, and overhead costs were deducted from what was left, it wasn't going to make much money--maybe none--while Cruise would walk away with seventy million dollars.