A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to a weekend seminar held by Syd Field, the international screenwriting guru whose books and lectures have made him a Hollywood legend. The event was organised by The Screenwriter’s Store, suppliers of some of the specialist writers’ software I’ve talked about before in these columns. Syd’s name is strongly associated with the traditional ‘beginning, middle and end’ three-act movie structure. But in recent years this structure has been challenged by new storytelling forms in movies like ‘Memento’ and ‘Irreversible’, which unfold their narratives back to front. Or keep you guessing with mind-warp flashbacks that may or may not represent reality, as in ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’. Tricks with time are also finding their way into more conventional stories like ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ and ‘The Bourne Supremacy’. Syd links this to the digital revolution; a shift in movie making that has brought about profound changes in the way screenwriters think about their craft.

That much-used phrase ‘the digital revolution’ cropped up in a different context a week later. This time it was Tom Meyer, one of the founders of the US start-up Sonos. Sonos has just introduced a multi-room audio system into the UK that delivers music over a wireless network around the house from any Mac, Windows or Linux server, all supervised from a neat handheld wireless controller. Tom was talking about the impact that digitisation has had on our music listening habits and expectations. Thanks in large part to the take up of Apple’s iPod, consumers now think of music tracks in terms of digital files. Buy a new CD and the first thing you do is rip it onto your PC. Or cut out the CD stage altogether by downloading it from the iTunes Music Store, or some similarly authorised (or perhaps not) source.

Tom’s business model for Sonos is dependent on consumers’ buying this digital vision. His system doesn’t bridge the gap for you by helping you rip your CDs – his kit is only useful to customers who’ve already bought into the digital revolution. But I began to wonder, as I had with Syd Field, whether Tom really had the whole picture.

Because the digital revolution in movies isn’t just about how you tell the stories. It’s also about how you shoot the movies (much more flexibly and potentially much more cheaply) and how you distribute the moves (using anything from secure, fast, commercial satellite channels to virtually no-cost peer-to-peer Internet file sharing). Those changes are every bit as fundamental as any impact digitisation might have on storytelling, and it’s my bet that they’ll at the very least bring an end to the Hollywood studio system, if not to Hollywood itself.

The Sonos vision seemed to me to be equally myopic. Yes, the digital revolution has transformed our view of music. But one key way it’s done this is to make us realise that music, pictures, movies and data of all kinds are all essentially the same stuff as far as shifting it around the house and around the world is concerned. So if I’m the digital revolutionary Tom hopes, I’m actually not in the market for that miracle of the 1970s: ‘a music system’, however adept it may be at filling my rooms with melody. I expect my 21st century digital wireless home network to carry movies, pictures and data too.

Sonos confines itself to music, unlike the growing number of all-round digital entertainment systems from companies like Pinnacle and D-Link. When I put this to Tom he pointed out, with some justification, that these other companies were finding video distribution over wireless networks particularly problematic, with customers complaining about freezing and dropouts. The Pinnacle ShowCenter originally offered only 802.11b, which with a maximum of 11Mbps turned out to be inadequate for video streaming. Even the Pinnacle support centre discussion groups reveal that its current 802.11g products (theoretically offering up to 54Mbps) are having intermittent problems transmitting video wirelessly. And it’s not a just a Pinnacle problem, the D-Link MediaLounge hardware comes with a warning flier that reads: “IMPORTANT. Your Wireless Media Player may skip or experience delays while wirelessly streaming media content, especially high bit-rate videos. This may be caused by environmental factors such as walls ...”

Tom Meyer has taken note of all this: “We’re building our company on happy customers and technology that works,” he told me. “We don’t want a lot of unhappy customers and technology that almost works”.

I can see his point. Of course a lot of unhappy customers and technology that almost works can be a viable business model too. Ask Microsoft.