ENTERTAINMENT IS RIGHT AT HOME

Television begat a revolution that has more facets than the mirrored ball above a dance floor. Whatever it did to our view of the world and our information, television pinioned millions of people to the living room in a way that even radio never managed, let alone Monopoly or canasta.

Now, after 40 years of television, the home is an entertainment center in a way it hasn’t been since before electricity, when there was a tradition of parlor musicales and occasional readings aloud.

Something like 97% of all American dwelling units have at least one TV set, a figure that has been steady for years; it is evidently the saturation point. But the number of dwellings with more than one set keeps rising.

The television set itself grows ever larger and more elaborate and majestic, now (belatedly) with stereo and an appetite for something like 180 channels (as if there were enough material to nurture more than half a dozen).

A glance at any shopping mall, any neighborhood shopping street, confirms the infiltration of the videocassette into daily life on a vast scale.

The latest trade estimate is that, with 7.5 million videocassette recorders sold already in 1985, the year’s total after the Christmas rush could reach 11.5 million--4 million more than were bought in 1984.

The even newer home-centered enthusiasm is the compact-disc player, of which there are thought to be 1.5 million already in use, enlarging the high-fidelity complex that in many homes now resembles the cockpit of a 747 in the size and array of its knobs, dials and toggles.

After a period in which it was used almost exclusively for music, and for pop music, the audiocassette suddenly seems to be bursting with multiplicity: best sellers to be heard and absorbed en route to the office--instruction, information, how to do practically anything this side of open-heart surgery (and for a specialized medical audience, maybe that, too; I haven’t been circularized).

The trend toward the home as an entertainment center was detectable a quarter-century ago, when the LP and hi-fi grew hand in hand and hi-fi gave FM radio a much expanded hold on life, and the graph of TV sets in use shot skyward while the curve of film attendance dropped like a stone.

What was hard to foresee even then, however, was the variety of devices and systems that technology still had in store. And it is not only that the compact-disc players and the VCRs have come into being, it is that competition and mass marketing have taken them so quickly from luxury items to consumer goods.

The current decline in movie-going can’t be attributed solely to the rise of the VCR, but there seems no doubt that the VCR home date is making inroads on the traditional movie date. It’s hard not to believe that the richness of the home entertainment options will have other effects on the patterns of pleasure, influencing decisions about going out versus staying put.

The number and range of videocassettes, audiocassettes, compact discs and the related sophisticated gadgetries of home entertainment (or engrossment or edification) is approaching flood tide, but it’s a reasonable guess we haven’t seen or heard it all yet by any means.

The weekly Home Tech column being launched today will sample the new volume of available material. It will augment, not supplement, the existing coverage of records and videocassettes. It suggests that the parlor isn’t what it used to be; you just have to worry about power failures.