Michael Blowhard links to this New York Times piece about the inexorable rise of what it will eventually make sense to call home cinema.

Movies routinely make more money (sometimes twice as much) on video than in theaters: "8 Mile," starring the rapper Eminem, earned $117 million at the box office and $130 million on DVD and cassette; "Drumline" $56.4 million and $84.7 million, respectively; "Barbershop" $76 million and $102 million; "One Hour Photo" $31.6 million and $72.6 million.

(Given how bad I am at numbers, god bless copy and paste to enable me to serve up these without pain.)

I'm a bit surprised that there hasn't been more said about the influence of the home video market on the content of movies.

The big change for me is that you can now watch movies again and again, and that changes the experience, especially if, like me, you often have trouble getting all the subtleties of a plot the first time around. My enjoyment of A Few Good Men, a classic old-fashioned but quite complicated courtroom, would have been be nothing compared to what it has been, if I'd only been able to watch it just the once.

Maybe video tapes have masked the effect. They are so clunky that they were only ever going to be a stopgap until something adequate and silvery and shiny came along, but their effect has perhaps been to disguise any major impact that the punters actually owning movies might have on the movie-making business. It happened too gradually to be obvious. I'm sure the movie-makers themselves have noticed all kinds of differences, obvious and not so obvious.

But what have been the consequences of home video?

Well, I don't know. That's why I'm asking.

But here's a speculation about what might be in the pipeline, which is movies that make virtually no sense until you've pretty much memorised them, and are massively denser and more information packed than your average movie is now. I personally have to struggle to stay awake through the movies of Peter Greenaway. Only the music amuses me. But I've an idea that his movies – I'm thinking especially of one called Prospero's Books (which is an adaptation of The Tempest, I believe – yes) – fill this particular bill.

Because surely one of the big impacts of owning a really nice version of a movie as opposed to merely being able to watch it once in a cinema or bash your way through a hard-to-access VHS tape, is that we can now contemplate movies in the way we only used to be able to contemplate a big and detailed still painting, or a photo.

Or a novel. Imagine what a different art form the novel would be if you were only allowed to access it by listening to it being read allowed at a public performance, once.

Go to rush. Going drinking with all the other London bloggers. Sorry for any typos. Tell you what. Don't scrutinise this. Just read it once.