Red Herring's Blog has a thought-provoking entry regarding how newer digital media is allowing us to experience media in ever-richer forms, part of why Steven Berlin Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You is right (I Like to Watch):

Arguably, one reason you can have shows as complex as The Sopranos is that video lets you go back to a story and catch what you missed the first time. It's no coincidence that Twin Peaks was the first great hit of the VCR age: I had friends who watched Agent Cooper's surreal dream, in which he discovers who killed Laura Palmer, frame by frame. Forget doing anything that involved with TV before video. Likewise, George Lucas can throw Corellian star cruisers and first-generation Tie fighters on the screen with abandon, safe in the knowledge that we'll be able to watch a dogfight over and over again, and sort out the complexity of a scene over time.