TV: The extra-large, ultra-small medium

On Monday morning, news networks were breathlessly covering two entirely different hurricanes.

The first blew off the screen in all its fury, droplets speeding by, stop signs spinning, palm fronds flying and strands of soaked hair clinging to correspondents' foreheads. Debris clattered down deserted streets, and the wind screamed from a growl to a whistle and back again.

The second storm was much tamer: Palm trees swayed, but with something that looked more like stop-motion animation than deadly natural force. Mostly it looked like a foggy, soundless gray blur.

Both hurricanes were Wilma, but one was the large-screen, plasma version; the other belonged to a mobile phone with a screen about one-twentieth the size of the first. One was affixed to a wall; the other could roam all over New York, on the subway, at a playground, in a coffee shop.

Technology tends to shrink. Hulking mainframes begat slim laptops; boxy mobile phones and digital cameras have dematerialized into silvery credit cards. But something curious is happening to television: It's simultaneously growing gigantic and minuscule, stretching across living room walls at the same time it slips into pockets. People can brag about their 60-inch plasma screens and their palm-size nanocasters in the same breath.

For now, television may still mostly be a medium-size medium. Plenty of bedrooms and doctors' offices still have 20-inch sets--and depending on picture quality and where the viewer sits, those screens can be impressively clear. But there is a growing fetish for televisions on the far ends of the size spectrum. Huge, crystalline displays, once the province of wealthy A/V geeks and Hollywood executives, have dropped so far in price that they are within reach of everyday people.

And the same audience can buy televisions the size of candy bars. The newest Apple iPods can be loaded with television shows, and nearly every major cell phone carrier is building television capability (live broadcasts, on-demand programming, or both) into its devices, hoping that Americans will embrace the feature the way they did the cameras planted in phones a few years ago.

It seems a little silly to call any one of these devices televisions. The big ones are home theaters, intended just as much for DVD watching and video-game-playing as for catching "Law and Order." The small ones are variously communications devices, music players, hard drives and cameras. But there is another problem with the common name: The two sizes of televisions make for such a different viewing experience that they almost seem like two separate media altogether. In a few years the extra-extra-extra large and ultra-ultra-ultra tiny televisions may come to seem like distant ancestral cousins, bound by a common genealogy and little else.

The mobile-television skeptics--and there are at least as many of them as there are evangelists--claim that few users will want to squint through shows on thumb-size screens. As they see it, portable television has long been a poignant and rather hopeless dream, from Motorola's 1960 Astronaut to Sony's 1982 Watchman. Even today, less than 1 percent of mobile phone subscribers in the United States--about 1.5 million people, according to M: Metrics, a mobile technology research firm--watch television on their cell phones.

Traveling with your TV
But viewers have begun to adopt more mobile forms of television, from the 36 channels of DirecTV on JetBlue flights to the vintage "Simpsons" episodes that play on laptops the world over. And with the spread of the technology to iPods and cell phones, your tiny new television will always be with you.

"I have my cell phone with me more than I have my wallet," said Paul Scanlan, a co-founder of MobiTV, a service that broadcasts networks like Fox Sports, MSNBC and TLC to the cell phones of about 500,000 subscribers.

Portable television is usually considered exciting because it shatters the attachment to a fixed viewing space. But because these devices are ever-present, they are also violating the long-established rules of broadcast time to which plug-in sets are still beholden, despite incursions by TiVo and its cousins. As a glance at any program grid reveals, it is still an orderly world of half-hour and hourlong chunks that start at the tops and bottoms of hours.

Your large television is meant to cut a neat hole in your day, most likely at the beginning or end of it, when you'll settle in for a movie, a favorite show, a game. But small-screen television fills the ragged holes that already exist in your routine: The 37-minute train to work, the 6-minute line at Starbucks, or as a MobiTV user survey recently revealed, the stretches spent in the bathroom.

Accordingly, miniature television has its own miniature prime times: The commuting hours, lunchtime, the afternoon hours when teenagers leave school. To suit the odd shapes, it compresses normal television time into short gulps. Fox and MTV, among other networks, have begun to produce "mobisodes," original series that deliver a few minutes of action at a time. GoTV, which provides on-demand television to cell phone users, offers four-minute editions of "Desperate Housewives" and "Alias"--not trailers, but Cliffs Notes versions for those viewers who simply want to keep up.

Television may continue to adapt to the small screen along these lines--or it could simply break apart by genre, with some forms thriving on the large screens and others migrating to the tiny ones.

"You could watch Oprah Winfrey on a two-inch screen and you wouldn't lose anything," Michael Fremer, a critic of audio and video equipment for Ultimate AV and Stereophile magazines, said.

Watching games, in contrast, belongs firmly to the giant screens, so much so that sales of high-end televisions spike before events like the Super Bowl. (Fans may use small devices to scratch their score-checking itches or watch highlights, but once you've counted the laces on a televised football, it's hard to go back.) And long, immersive, visually complicated programs--like detailed PBS documentaries, or richly detailed hourlong dramas--dominate the high-definition world.

Take "Lost," which may be the first hit television show of the superscreen era. The show is filmed (and financed) like a movie,

with an enormous cast, a stunning locale and elaborate action scenes. And its mysteries sometimes turn on intricate visual clues, as in a moment early this season when a shark menaced two characters clinging to the remains of a raft. In high-definition, viewers may have noticed that the shark was tattooed with a corporate logo, a significant hint about the bizarre ecosystem of the island. Though the iPod's images are impressive, it is hard to catch that kind of detail on a tiny screen, let alone one viewed on, say, a moving subway car. Which is part of why Apple's announcement of its deal to offer "Lost" for downloading and iPod viewing was so surprising.

"Lost" isn't the only program that feels utterly different depending on which television displays it. In high-definition, "news will freak you out," Mark Cuban, chairman and president of the HDNet cable service, said.

Indeed, the network's report of attacks on Shiite worshipers in Karbala, Iraq, is breathtaking: When the bombs go off, you can see the hands of bystanders flinch in response, and a few seconds later, the bloodied limbs of victims jostle as they are rushed past the camera on makeshift litters. Viewed on a mobile-phone screen, Monday's attack on several Baghdad hotels seemed murky in comparison: it was hard to tell soldiers from civilians, Iraqis from foreigners, bombed-out buildings from intact ones.

So far, changes in television technology--most notably the rise of color broadcasting around the time of the Vietnam War--have only made the news more vivid. But dramatic news may come to seem somehow less so on a tiny screen, even on one with pristine picture quality.

Yet what the tiny new televisions lose in spectacle, they make up in intimacy. As large televisions become home movie theaters, small televisions may restore something personal and human-scale to the medium. And something wondrous: The long-lost surprise at moving images beamed directly into our personal space. Further, the squarish screens and imperfect images (some of the phone televisions have a pixilated effect, making every face look like a Chuck Close painting) give something of an early-television effect. Going even further back in broadcast history, these tiny screens might even remind some of the golden era of radio. According to Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, they force us to balance our senses differently, relying more on our ears and less on our eyes, which seems fitting because these televisions are embedded in audio devices.

But perhaps the most retro aspect of this odd moment in television's history is that these two very different scales may rekindle the tradition of communal viewing. "With a large screen coming into the home, people are watching together more than they have been a bit recently," said David Tice, director of Knowledge Networks' Home Technology Monitor, a yearly study of media device ownership. Proud owners invite neighbors and friends to watch their big-screen televisions, just as previous generations did with those thrilling new color units.

And because they are used in public, miniature televisions are not as solitary as they might seem. "If there's live breaking news, everyone will be huddled around it," Scanlan said. Manufacturers have begun building phones with camcorders, allowing users to take and send their own clips. On the small screen, their hand-held, homemade rhythms resemble those of reality TV. It is not hard to imagine a television future in which we watch a weather report, and then a video of our cousin's Little League home run, and then Jon Stewart's opening monologue from the previous evening.

Like nearly everything else about mobile televisions, the camcorder feature can make a viewer accustomed to more passive forms of television-watching feel strangely powerful. To watch a big, high-quality set is to be pleasantly overwhelmed: The picture engulfs your entire field of vision, tempting you to surrender to the sheer force of the images. (Viewers of these sets "tend to not change channels as often," Tice said. "They're more involved in that program and less likely to switch away.")

But on a small set, you loom over the inch-tall figures, cupping them in your hands, and your fingers never leave the buttons that control them. As new as the sensation is, there's something familiarly televisionlike about it, and then you realize: What you're doing, in effect, is watching a remote control.