Screens have always been getting bigger but a trend in recent years is eliminating them altogether. Myke Ireland looks at what’s next and what it could do for the integration industry.

Being born during the era of colour TV means I missed the big shift from black and white. Lucky me. But the first real revolution in display technology that I actually lived through? That was the move from cathode ray to flat screens.

The cathode ray TV was a monstrosity. Bulky, deep and no matter how you dressed it up, it always looked like furniture you tolerated rather than chose.

The problem was the depth. CRT technology required a very firm relationship between width and depth, which meant there was a hard limit on how big you could go before the thing consumed your entire living room. You could have a 30” screen, sure, but it came with two feet of cabinet behind it.

The dream was always flat. Always. And depending on which side of Melbourne’s Yarra River you grew up on, you might have been lucky enough to have a projector, but the same deal, it wasn’t the kind of device that could be left on display permanently. The best we ever had growing up was the old trusty slide projector. A few slide nights here and there, but mostly, we were a family huddled around a 30” CRT with built-in speakers, watching whatever free-to-air had to offer. Very likely The Simpsons.

I held onto that world longer than I’d like to admit. My first flat screen didn’t arrive until I was 30 (2010) and when it did, I went all in. A 65” Panasonic Viera VT. Plasma. At the time, it was arguably the best flat screen you could buy, inheriting all the IP from Panasonic’s retired Pioneer Kuro plasma, the undisputed champion of picture quality. That thing was a beast. Glass-fronted, heavy as hell, definitely not a one-man lift. But it was glorious.

And suddenly, size became the next battleground.

Because once we killed the depth problem, width was the only limit left. Manufacturers pushed it; 65”, 75”, 85”, 100”. Bigger, brighter, clearer. My 65” plasma dominated my little two-bedroom townhouse as the centrepiece. Friends would come around for the footy, the Grand Prix, whatever was on. It was a cool place to hang out. And back then, we still gathered around the TV. This was before social media and smartphones swallowed every spare second of our attention.

But just as the depth issue hampered our egos when it came to CRTs, the world figured out pretty quickly that there’s a ceiling with flat panel displays too, one of which is the literal ceiling. Most homes comfortably max out somewhere between 65” and 85”. Some manufacturers are still pushing past 100”, which is good fun, but at a certain point, it’s just marketing. The reality is that any 100” display or bigger needs a dedicated room, given they’re at least 1.2 x 3.4m on your way, and you should be sitting about 3m away from it. It scales out pretty quickly.

Free-to-air TV went live in Australia in 1956 (the year my mother was born, hi mum), and for 50 years it was arguably the most important screen in our lives. But almost 50 years later, another screen became part of our daily use, and everything started to change.

Screens were now more than just devices mounted on walls, viewed from a distance or attached to computers. They were now in the palm of your hand. Personal. Immediate. Commanding. Media consumption shifted from communal to individual, and suddenly, the TV in the room wasn’t the only display fighting for your attention; it wasn’t even the primary one.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve started asking a different question: Does the size of the display even matter anymore?

Look at it this way; you could install a 110” projector screen on a wall, pair it with a top-of-the-range Christie or Barco, throw in cinema-quality sound, and if you had three or four teenagers in that room watching a movie, I can guarantee you their eyes would still be glued to the screens in their hands. Not the communal one they’re supposed to be sharing.

So, what does that tell us?

It tells us that size has stopped being the currency. What matters now is how much information a screen can give you, how organically it integrates into your life and how quickly it responds to what you need. The 100” display on the wall might be technically superior in every measurable way, but if the 6” screen in your pocket delivers what you want faster, more fluidly and more personally? That’s where your attention goes.

And so, what we’re really discussing then must be a power exchange. From size as power to experience as power, and most TV manufacturers can’t hold a candle to the UI of a modern smartphone, no matter how hard they try.

So, if the screen in your hand is winning the attention war, what’s an industry supposed to do when its entire business model is built on manufacturing big screens for communal settings?

The answer, historically, has been to keep pushing the specs. Size was one lever. Resolution was the other.

We watched HD become Full HD, then 4K, and now 8K is sitting on the shelf, waiting for the world to catch up. But there are a couple of problems in that roadmap too, bandwidth is one, and much like size, practicality is the other. Because if our screens aren’t getting any bigger, and we’ve already established they’re not, then how much further can resolution actually go before we hit diminishing returns?

Personally, I’m not convinced anything past 8K makes sense for the screen sizes most of us are living with. At a certain point, you’re adding pixels the human eye can’t even resolve at normal viewing distances. It’s spec-sheet engineering at best, but it doesn’t have a real impact on the viewing experience; manufacturers know this, even if they won’t admit it.

If size has plateaued and resolution is approaching irrelevance, where does the industry go next?

Here’s where it gets interesting: What if the answer is no screen at all?

I’m talking about VR. AR. Mixed reality. Whatever you want to call it. The technology that lets you strap something like Apple’s Vision Pro or Meta’s Oculus to your face and suddenly you’re not looking at a screen anymore – you’re in the screen. Virtual real estate, infinite canvas, no physical boundaries. No brightness issues, no glare, no fighting over whether the couch is too close or the room’s too bright. You’re just… immersed.

And the very stark reality here is: If that technology becomes affordable, and it will, eventually, that becomes the next communal experience.

Picture this: You’ve got mates over. Everyone’s sitting in the same room, but instead of staring at a 110” screen on the wall, you’re all wearing headsets, sharing a virtual screen that exists in a space only you can see. You’re together, physically, but the experience is happening somewhere else. Somewhere bigger. Somewhere that doesn’t care about the limitations of your living room or the size of your TV. You might be sitting court-side at a New York Knicks game, you might be riding Shotgun with Broc Feeney in a V8 Supercar. Who knows?, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be worlds more entertaining than the dimly lit rectangle on the wall.

Try not to forget the whole point of the home cinema setup was to recreate the magic of the theatre. To make the experience as immersive as possible. And for decades, that meant bigger screens, better sound, darker rooms. But how much more immersive can you get than being inside the experience? Not watching it. Not sitting in front of it. In it. Enveloped. With your mates right there with you, also enveloped, also experiencing it exactly the same way. Technically, all that can happen right now if you have the wads of cash to build the rig, but remember how expensive video cameras once were. Now there’s one in every smart device you can carry.

So, then it becomes about shared experiences again, but it’s also completely detached from the physical world. Standing in this moment, that’s either an exciting future or it’s a dystopian hell, I genuinely don’t know which. But I do feel like it’s inevitable.

What about this? If the experience is virtual, does it even matter if you’re in the same room? Could you have that same “shared” experience with someone on the other side of the world, sitting in their lounge room with their headset on, while you’re in yours? Are you still watching something together if you’re not actually together? I don’t have all the answers here. I’m not even sure I want them. But what I do know is we’re at a crossroads.

The value of the physical screen has shifted. It’s no longer the dominant source of information in the room; that title belongs to the phone. And it’s nowhere near as experiential as what the home cinema was designed to replicate. So, what’s left?

Maybe the answer is that the screen, as we know it, is done. Not dead, but done evolving in ways that matter. And the next frontier isn’t about making screens bigger or sharper, it’s about making them disappear entirely.

We haven’t seen the best of augmented reality yet. Not even close. But I can’t help but think we’re about to and maybe the real question isn’t about size or resolution or even whether the screen disappears. Maybe it’s simpler than that.

Maybe it’s just time we stopped thinking of the screen as a rectangle.

Since we were kids, the screen has always been a rectangle. Then it morphed into a flatter rectangle. And sure, the dimensions changed depending on context, cinema, hospital waiting room, billboard on the side of the freeway, but always a rectangle. There’s physics in that, I get it. But let’s back up for a second and ask: Why?

The screen, in its most original form, was emulating the moving picture. Which is what we used to call movies, back when that term still meant something. And movies? They were emulating stage plays. Humans sitting in a space, staring in one direction at performers on a stage. A rectangle. So, when we started projecting images, we kept the format. We built theatres, we mounted screens and we kept staring at rectangles because that’s what made sense at the time.

Look at something like the Sphere in Las Vegas, and suddenly all bets are off.

We’re not talking about a screen anymore, we’re talking about a surface. A wrapped, immersive, 360° experience that doesn’t ask you to look at something. It asks you to be inside it. That, combined with AR and VR, is where this is headed. Because sitting in a chair and staring at a rectangle on a wall? That’s not enough anymore.

You can replicate the full cinema experience at home now. Two grand worth of Sonos, a half-decent OLED, and a reasonably shaped room, and you’ve got it. No $35 popcorn. No sticky floors. No teenagers on their phones three rows behind you. And that shift has already happened. Cinemas are emptying out. Movies aren’t being made the way they used to be. Tuesday night half-price sessions? Dead. The entire model is crumbling because the rectangle on the wall at home is now just as good as the rectangle at the multiplex.

So why would anyone venture out? They don’t, and here we are.

What happens next? I think you keep a really close eye on the tech giants. NVIDIA, Apple, Meta, Google, they start to partner up with the media giants to deliver something that is for more immersive and far more experiential. I’m even a bit suspicious or Larry Ellison’s recently acquisition of Paramount, that one is definitely worth watching.

And so I guess that’s the best note to finish on, it ain’t how big it is anymore, only about whether or not it’s worth looking at.