Encouraging news: Roger Ebert and his wife Chaz have plans to produce a new version of his old movie-review show, tentatively to be called “Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies.”

Why do it, and why now?

“I can’t prove it, but I have the feeling that more different people are seeing more different movies than ever before,” Ebert, still writing for the Chicago Sun-Times and still the world’s best-known film critic, writes in a blog post. “With the explosion of DVD, Netflix, Red Box, and many forms of Video on Demand, virtually all movies are easily available to virtually all North American moviegoers.

“This has created a huge potential audience. When people tell me how many titles they have in their Netflix queues, I reflect that until recent years they’d be telling me how many movies never even played in their town.”

The co-hosts have been picked, the thumbs are coming back, and Ebert may turn in occasional guest segments, he says.

And Ebert promises that the new version of the show he created with Chicago Tribune frenemy Gene Siskel will be full-tilt new media: “Television, net streaming, cell phone apps, Facebook, Twitter, iPad, the whole enchilada. The disintegration of the old model creates an opening for us. I’m more excited than I would be if we were trying to do the same old same old.”

Here’s hoping all of those plans quickly come to fruition.