Spam TV, You TV, Global TV

The screen experience is increasingly mundane. It's less and less special because there's more and more of it about. We are drowning in video content. Even the bus that takes me home now has a video screen that shows footage from video surveillance and advertising. Technology has been shrinking the screen experience since the 1950s, when Gloria Swanson's character in Sunset Boulevard said, "I am big. It's the pictures that got small."

The pictures keep getting smaller: with sound, with colour, with television, with videos and DVDs, with portable DVD players and video players like those from Archos, Creative, and Thomson, video images become more unremarkable, more ubiquitous, more throw-away. With UMD movies on your PSP, they've got smaller still: you can now fit a Hollywood epic in your jeans pocket.

Yet if the screen experience is shrinking all around us, the technology is putting the remote control firmly in our hands. I love Freeview PVRs, because for a fraction of the cost of Sky+ I can get complete control over my TV viewing. Family life is no longer disrupted by a rushed meal in order to run to the TV to watch a favourite programme -- you can take your time, clear the table and watch what you want, when you want. You can pause the programme when the phone rings. You can go to bed and watch the rest later.

For the same reason, I love projectors and surround-sound systems that give us a cinema experience at home and liberate us from the limited screening times and narrow range of content at the local Odeon. Online video services like ScreenSelect.co.uk mean that I can watch a classy foreign film that won't be coming anywhere near our local multiplex. Home projectors are giving us control of film -- in the same way that high-quality, low-cost cameras like Sony's extraordinary FX1 are giving indie filmmakers control of the means of production.

I also like the way the technology is helping to create new kinds of content. As Steven Johnson points out in his recent book about popular culture, Everything Bad is Good for You, the DVD has given writers the freedom to write in more complex ways. They know that fans will be viewing their work over and over again at home, so they can add levels of detail and subtleties that would have flown over the heads of broadcast audiences who were only able to watch something once. So we get the intricate in-jokes of The Simpsons, or the adrenaline-fuelled academic complexity of The West Wing. The creators of The Office have said they felt under immense pressure to make sure the series could withstand the scrutiny of multiple viewings on DVD. We're all delighted they did. The hard work shows.

Despite all this increased choice from satellite, cable and other digital broadcasting, I can now see three primary channels that we need to worry about for now and into the future. The first is Spam TV: this is the barking CNN announcer in the airport departure lounge, channel surfing on a Sunday afternoon, the in-store video demonstrating how to grout your bathroom tiles at your local DIY hangar. Technology is making this ambient video noise ever more pervasive. We'll just have to deal with it. Expect more video spam in your life. Buy sunglasses. Take your iPod and a good book.

The second is You TV: selecting high-value content that you love, in the same way you select your favourite Web sites, RSS feeds or newsletters. If you've got the money to pay for it, you can access more and more content on your own terms: DVD services that give you access to rare or classic films and allow you to watch them when you want to; your own DVD libraries; the Internet TV services of the future; and video on-demand services like Homechoice that offer video content down a cable. The BBC's new media player trial offers the same huge benefit: TV that you want, not TV a broadcaster deigns to offer. All of these new services are getting us closer to a world in which we can avoid second-rate stuff we don't want, and go for the premium quality we do. This is where you get the programming that really works for you on DVD and where you get access to the best screen content that has been created from around the world. Those beguiling anti-TV types at The White Dot point out that TV's business model isn't based on us all watching programmes we like -- it's based on the inertia that means we all end up watching programmes we hate, because we can't find anything better. How else can we explain Celebrity Love Island?

Get the best tools you can to enjoy You TV, you'll have the best seat in the house. It's a funny thing talking to your friends in the US, because you discover that despite all that money going into producing US broadcast content, they only watch the same handful of quality programmes that we watch here. It's horrifing to consider the signal-to-noise ratio here: these treasures bob about on an ocean of mediocrity. We're finally getting the filters we need to fish out the best and discard the rest, which may be bad news if your job is making terrible TV. In some ways, broadcast TV has just been one terrible in-flight movie after another. What happens when the passengers can bring their own?

The third programme we need to think about is Global TV: those moments in the global village when we're all looking at something magical or terrifying. There's an electric charge when you know the whole world is watching. The sense of a shared experience heightens the impact of what you're seeing: whether it's watching London win its Olympic bid, seeing millions of people snapping their fingers at Live8, or England finally bringing home the Ashes.

I fear Global TV won't really win its biggest audiences with sport and music, though. Political thrillers and horror movies seem to bring in the really big ratings: a motorcade in Dallas, an airliner lancing into the side of a tower block. We'll watch it, but we'll sometimes have to look away.