Lord of the teeny wee Rings, anyone?

The new iPod, with video capabilities
Movies on the go... Apple is sell movies on the net through iTunes. Photograph: Arleen Ng/EPA
Peter Bradshaw
Thu 14 Sep 2006 19.00 EDT

It had to happen. People are already downloading movies on to their computers and even their phones illegally, as blithely as earlier generations taped the Sunday night top 40 off the radio, in flagrant contravention of the 1949 Wireless Telegraphy Act. Now Apple CEO Steve Jobs proposes to sell movies on the net through iTunes. As with Napster and music, the worlds of movies and software are making common cause to normalise film downloading - at a price.

But do we want to watch movies on our iPods? This new techno wheeze might just go the way of miniature TVs, which, despite razor-sharp pictures and lightweight technology, are somehow only to be seen on the counters of late-night off-licences and kebab shops. Would it be possible to appreciate The Lord of the Rings on iPod, when millions of orcs are sweeping across a plain no larger than a postage stamp? Admittedly, in-flight movies are shown on mini-screens on the seat-back or armrest, but watching these can be a dispiriting experience, especially as you get distracted by other movies on screens just centimetres away. Yet for long plane journeys, you might want to carry your favourite film aboard in your tiny iPod, whose size does not pose a security problem.

Letting the children watch a DVD in the back of a car during a long journey can be a boon, but when the screen is iPod-tiny, it will kick off mighty squabbling as two or three infant heads clash to watch The Incredibles or Finding Nemo. Tube journeys? Train journeys? These could be too short and too crowded to allow for anything like watching a film. Perhaps people will prefer to watch segments of their own digital home movies, or perhaps in future they will download their favourite clips from YouTube.

But the question of iPod movies may be a red herring. It's more a question of digital storage. Already, renting and buying DVDs over the web is causing the disappearance of the high-street video store. Now, just as iPods are eroding the number of music CDs, and home TV systems such as Sky Plus and TiVo put paid to VHS cassettes, movie downloads stored centrally will challenge the old-style Digital Versatile Disc. As it is, rental DVDs are notoriously vulnerable to scuffing, rendering the disc likely to freeze five minutes before the end of the film - something the humble videocassette never did!

People will download movies to their iPods - but not necessarily watch them on this medium. They will output them to their computer screens, their high-definition plasma TV screens, or even their digital projectors and watch a huge picture on the wall. Whether this can upend the DVD market would depend on offering all that a disc offers in terms of extras, and having more than a few movies might just take up too much space on an iPod or hard drive. It all depends on the technology. But the way in which we consume, collect and watch movies is changing at a dizzying pace.