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The movies have been wrestling with this conundrum from the start, when Thomas Edison filmed an 1894 match between the boxers Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing and sold it to the public on Kinetoscope at 10 cents a round.

Thomas Edison’s early Kinetoscope films from the late 19th century, short looped films seen via a viewing cabinet, come to mind.

Here, the sun can drop into the water like a nickel into a gumball machine, like a nickel into L.A.’s earliest Kinetoscope machines, in a parlor on Spring Street downtown, 125 years ago.

The business allowed customers to access entertainment — music, speeches and, eventually, brief kinetoscope movies — for a nickel a spin.

The first public movie screening was in Paris, in 1895, using a device inspired by Thomas Edison's electric Kinetoscope.