I confess I’ve been reluctant to write about the migration of prestige films from the arthouse to the living room. I keep hearing about streaming media, HDNet, day-and-date platforming, etc.  But technology won’t wait. A few months ago, Wayne Wang released his feature film “The Princes of Nebraska” on YouTube. Then eternal maverick Steven Soderbergh released the Oscar-worthy “Che” on cable before it arrived in provincial cinemas. So this kind of cross-platform releasing is here to stay.

On Friday, indie cinema stalwart Mark Lipsky, a former exec at  Miramax and IFC, is taking a big step toward the future with his new company, Gigantic Digital. Gigantic is releasing the documentary “Must Read After My Death” in theaters in New York and L.A. on the same day that the rest of the country can stream the film in high-definition at giganticdigital.com. Compared to a theater ticket–or a flight to one of the coasts–the price is a bargain: $2.99 to watch the film as often as you like for three days.

In “Must Read After My Death,” documentarian Morgan Dews reconstructs his grandparents’ dysfunctional marriage, using reams of home movies and audio recordings that the husband and wife made for each other, for their children and for posterity while the marriage was being torn apart by infidelity and abuse. This fascinating X-ray of the reality behind a white picket fence has been compared to the controversial doc “Capturing the Friedmans”; but the crimes committed in this family were not the sort that would make headlines.

I’m still opposed to watching good new movies at home when you can watch them on the big screen in a cinema sanctum; but those of us in the heartland won’t always have that option.  Here’s Lipsky’s thinking:

Moviegoers will never abandon the movie house but they won’t be going there to see independent cinema. Every day thousands more households upgrade to large, widescreen monitors. Every day thousands more households extend their broadband connections to big-screen TVs and home entertainment systems. By 2011, most TVs will have built-in wireless forever merging the internet with the television. These are the art houses. This is ‘indie film’ in 2009 and beyond.

Here’s the trailer for “Must Read After My Death”: