This last week's transition of television from analog to digital is a concrete milestone showing how much we've progressed in terms of delivery of information and entertainment to the home!
Today, even as traditional news media organizations are attacked on an ongoing basis by technology advances that stress their survival, making them seem obsolete and slow, e.g., see the trending topic #IranElections "coverage" of the Iran election on Twitter, Flickr, News and Blog search, other technology advances offer a richer delivery of multimedia content on phones, computers and televisions, forcing innovation in communications and cable companies.
High definition digital television is just...awesome! It will be interesting to see when high quality collides with the democratization of media...
Rewind...
We got our first television (a color TV) in time for the New Delhi Asian games (1982). At that time, we had neighbours who had black and white sets that they "upgraded" to color by placing translucent pink/blue screens over the set!! The "sepia" mutiny!!
When we were graduate students in Houston, my roommate and I had 2 hand-me-down B&W sets - one had better audio, the other had a great crisp picture - so we'd often turn both on :-) - that was the birth of Dolby "multimodal stereo" (patent pending!). When we had guests, for fun, we'd sometimes tune them to different channels - I can't describe the entertainment value of that!
Today, TIVO/DVRs are mandatory technology (once you've been exposed!). I find it difficult to watch a regular (non-HD) channel on my TV! U-Verse from ATT allows you to play 4 different programs to HD TVs in your home! Sony's Playstation 3, Apple TV and Windows Media Center are vying to become your online living room hub.
Like it or not, TV has gone digital in the U.S. - 1080 progressive ... here we come!
No comments:
Post a Comment