Digital Video Production for Interactive Media Essay
The way we watch and access video has changed massively in the last 50 years.
One of the first times we had control of when we wanted to watch something was way back in the 70’s. The 70’s brought us the Video Tape which let people watch a movie at their home whenever they wanted for the first time. JVC created the Video Tape which was first introduced in Japan. To begin with video tapes used a reel to reel system which was inconvenient because you would have to pull the tape from the reel into the playing device. The invention of the cassette tape got rid of that tricky process because it could do it itself. Video tapes biggest rival was Betamax which was developed by Sony Over the years, video cassettes have come in a variety of different shapes and sizes. My first memory of watching movies outside of the cinema were on video tape. I remember watching films like Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Antz and some of the Muppets films on tape way back in the late nineties and early noughties. I remember in Infant School and Primary school whenever we used to watch a video they would wheel in a TV on a stand and put the tape into a VHS. Whenever the TV got wheeled in everyone would go mental because it meant we were watching a film. It was the best thing ever. Nowadays movies just get played on the smart boards. It doesn’t feel as special as it used too.
The creation of the DVD in 1995 (Just 20 years after the invention of the VHS tape) signified the end of the video tape era. DVD’s didn’t just play the movie, it also came with a bunch of special features that weren’t possible on tape like scene selection and chapters. You no longer had to spend ages fast forwarding (which DVD’s could do faster) to get to your favorite part of a film. Furthermore, they didn’t deteriorate over time. As long as you didn’t scratch or break the disc, you’re guaranteed great quality playback quality. Speaking of quality, DVD’s could hold a lot more data on them, 5GB on the first DVD’s ever made, which allowed for higher quality video. Digital Versatile Discs let you play up to 480p (or 567p) quality videos and over the last decade and a half this grew allowing for more features etc. DVD’s are still produced today but they no longer offer the highest quality.
In 2002 the Blu-ray Disc was first unveiled by it’s creators The Blu-ray Disc association. It wasn’t for several years though before Blu-ray got it’s foot in the door. The first movies released on Blu-ray didn’t come out until 2006 which included Fifth Element, the original Terminator and 50 First Dates. Like other generations before this, there was a bit of a battle between two different systems. Blu-rays main competitor was HD DVD. HD DVD is to Blu-ray what Betamax was to Video Tape. The battle between the PS3 and Xbox 360 was also encompassed within this battle, PS3 supporting Blu-ray whilst the 360 could support HD DVD’s. Blu-rays outsold HD DVD’s massively and after a while major studios stopped distributing their movies on the format giving full support to Blu-ray. Not long after rental stores like Blockbusters stopped stocking HD DVD’s which was straw that broke the camels back.Blu-ray had prevailed in this format war. Every movie I buy now is a Blu-ray. I think Blu-ray is actually better quality than my eyeballs, it’s so good.
Nowadays though with the internet, you can download movies illegally from sites like the PirateBay. It used to be that if you had a pirate copy of a film it would just be someone who had gone into the cinema with a camera and filmed it. But now, with the internet and more movies being digitally produced and distributed as opposed to film and film reels, it has changed the way people pirate movies and TV shows. Now you can download the movie in HD quality. Some of the files can be massive and take ages to download but this is something they’re getting better at too. They use codecs to compress the files into smaller files making it quicker and easier to download. A codec has two parts—the encoder, which is what you use while you’re encoding the video from your timeline or file. The second part is the decoder; this part resides on the viewer’s computer as an add-in to decode the video inside the container. A popular codec used to compress HD videos is H.264. This is codec runs on most computers which means playing the video much easier. But there are a whole host of other codecs that could do the job, there are thousands upon thousands of codecs out there. With internet speeds getting faster and faster, downloading torrents is going to get easier. Stopping people from downloading torrents is incredibly hard to do because the internet is such a vast space.
There are hundreds and hundreds of codecs but you need a corresponding computer/device for them all to work. For example, if you recorded something a video on a Sony camera you would have to use the corresponding codec to edit that footage. With every new codec editing gets a little bit easier. If you look back at films from 30 or 40 years ago compared to todays movies, you can see how it has improved and that is, in part, thanks to codecs.
Another alternative to DVD’s and Blu-rays are instant streaming services like Netflix and LoveFilm which are only £6 a month. Most of these companies used to provide a rental service much like Blockbuster did. They diversified to stay alive and it has been a huge success. Netflix now has over 44 million subscribers worldwide across 40 different countries. An astonishing 63% of Americans stream movies and TV shows using Netflix. An incredible 1 billion hours of video is watched on Netflix a month. This has led to Netflix securing 66% of the digital movie rental market. But competitors of Netflix are getting stronger, like Amazon Instant. Netflix and Amazon are now even creating their own original TV Shows. Netflix are behind shows like the critically acclaimed House of Cards, Orange is the New Black whereas Amazon has Alpha House and Copper. These services, especially Netflix, are compatible across dozens of platforms from games consoles, mobiles, tablets, desktops, laptops and smart TV’s. It accessible where ever you are whether you are at home or on your travels. It has also coined the phrase ‘binge watching’ which is when you watch whole seasons of a TV show in a single sitting. Work is being done to create technology that can stream 4K video seamlessly. Many believe streaming video is the future and that physical DVD’s will one day be a thing of the past and I think that will happen one day but I do like having a physical copy of films and TV shows because I like having a collection of Blu-rays and that’s something I would miss.
The way we can access television has changed too. In the early days TV was transmitted through cables and this worked because of a technique called frequency division multiplexing. What that means is that each channel it’s own frequency. It does this at the headend of the cable, the bit that goes into your TV. Because of widespread cable theft, modern cable TV is encrypted and you need a code to activate it. The biggest cable TV provider in the UK at the moment is Richard Branson’s Virgin Media.
This was how TV worked until the early 90’s. That’s when the satellite dish came out and revolutionized the way we get our TV. With a satellite dish you can pick up broadcast signals beamed down from space. This gives satellite TV an advantage over cable in that it can cover a much greater surface area. If you lived in a secluded area like a farm in the countryside, then you would struggle to get cable TV because the provider would have to put a cable in place which would mean digging underground costing a lot of money. You’d probably have to settle with the radio.
These days you can catch-up on TV you’ve missed with services like BBC iPlayer and 4OD. You can get these services on everything from your mobile phone/tablet via their respective apps and of course you can catch-up on your TV among other things. In addition, TV providers like Sky and Virgin Media offer movie and TV on demand services. For example, you can get whole box sets of TV shows like Game of Thrones using these services, in a similar fashion to how Netflix provide their content. The difference is broadcasters like Sky have content available to them that Netflix don’t, making their package more appealing.
Websites like YouTube and Vimeo offer everyone the ability to put their own stuff online, getting it out to a massive, worldwide audience. An incredible 1 billion users visit YouTube every month across 61 countries. The big YouTubers earn gargantuan amounts of money from their videos like Pewdiepie and Phillip DeFranco. They get this money via advertisements on their video where they get a tiny amount money (just a few pence) of per click or by how many views it has but these big YouTubers get millions of views per video, and most of them bring out a few videos a week. For example, it’s estimated that Pewdiepie, the most subscribed to channel on YouTube earns up to $8million a year. Many YouTubers diversify and expand too, a lot have their own merchandise like T-shirts. Some YouTubers have used the site as a platform to jump into TV like Ryan Higa. YouTube gives everyone the opportunity to show off their skills and create their own media products, no matter what they are and more and more people are starting to do this with 100 hours of video uploaded every minute.
There are mobile phone applications that have grew incredibly fast in the last few years. Vine is an app that lets its users create 7 second clips. Millions of users now use the service with some of Vine’s biggest stars making a living from it through creating Vines for Corporate business. Who would have thought 50 years ago that people could make a living, a pretty hefty living at that, from making 7 second videos on an application on a mobile phone.
Joshua Wright 