First pushed aside by property agencies and now by Italian-themed rip-offs preying on mainland tourists, what has happened to a night at the movies?

It can't be blamed solely on landlords. The consumer price index shows ticket prices for cinemas declining over the last two years, even while the overall level of prices has risen. The audience is sadly not showing up in droves.

Cinemas were also given a break from rent pressures a few years ago when fire regulations were relaxed to allow them to share fire exits with other building tenants, allowing them to move from the ground level to cheaper higher floors.

But something else has happened to a night at the movies - and it's illustrated by my favourite cinema in my district, Repulse Bay.

This cinema has a wide screen just the right distance from a seat I can always reserve. The screen has the best and latest high-definition technology and the seat is sofa-sized, with virtually unlimited leg room. There is top quality bar and food service, including any alcoholic beverage, and I can conveniently choose my own screening times.

This cinema is my home.

I have an ever wider selection of films I can watch - far more than those showing in commercial cinemas at any given time.

'Ticket prices' for my home theatre have declined steadily. I still buy or rent DVDs, but my old-fashioned practices are increasingly scorned when Hollywood offerings can be downloaded for free from the internet even before they are released in cinemas here.

It's illegal, yes, but so widespread a practice as to make a mockery of the law. Given the recent defeats of copyright holders in America, this will not change. Best change the law instead.

We forget sometimes that cinemas are a comparatively recent innovation. They came into existence little more than 100 years ago, reached the peak of their patronage perhaps 60 years ago, and have since been in relative decline under the pressure of television, advances in recording media, and now the internet. It is entirely conceivable that they will go the way of the music halls that preceded them.

But synchronised audio and video as a form of both communication and entertainment won't go away; it will evolve. Already, the cinema's latest counter-move, 3-D, is being stalled by 3-D television sets.

I don't know any more than you do where all this will take us, although I will regret it if it leads only to the inside of one's home, making the social aspect of movie-going disappear. There is magic in shared laughter and popcorn, and being part of the crowd.

If others don't value it as much, however, this side of watching a movie could vanish and nothing I can do will stop it. Standing in the way of these elemental changes is like defying a tsunami: you just get washed over and rolled way.

My point here is that the same fate awaits the Hong Kong Film Development Council or the Hong Kong Theatres Association if they try to tell the future what the future must be. Putting a cinema in every district is not to accommodate the evolution of the industry, but to freeze it in its past.

The inevitable result will be a waste of public resources as cinema sites are sold for less than what they might fetch under more open leases. There will also be an even greater squeeze on remaining shop space, leading to higher rents and more shops 'Vuittonised'.

If the future of film and cinemas will be vastly different from the present, then so be it. Let's just stay quick on our feet and adapt.

We've done this before by abandoning a huge stock of industrial space when manufacturing moved across the border. We didn't try telling the garment industry it had to stay. We made the change and our reward was a booming services sector.

Preserving cinemas will bring us a cultural desert, not a cultural flowering.