Understand developing technologies in the television and film industries

Consumer Products -
Consumer products are anything that a consumer can buy. In the context of this blog post, it is concentrating on the media technology that can be bought and then used by a 'regular' customer. Products like cameras, sound equipment, editing software etc can all be bought by anybody (who has the money) and also be rented out for however long, within reason, from media equipment loaning companies.  The Internet has been a massive addition to the availability of media in the household. "Web 2.0" is the term used to describe the change from "static pages of earlier Web sites" to the type of web pages we have today, multi-layered and full of media.

Satellite/Cable -
Both 'satellite' and 'cable' are two different types of ways of receiving broader television programming rather than the 4 primary channels. An example of satellite TV is SkyTV. Satellite TV works by having a 'satellite dish' fitted to the outside of your house which receives signal from a 'communication satellite' which is in space.
Advantages of satellite are: a massive amount of channels are received, you receive channels that are exclusive to just SkyTV owners.
Disadvantages of satellite TV are: Signal can be removed by extreme weather, it is very expensive, not all of the channels are 'yours' at the beginning, you have to 'unlock' certain channels by paying for certain 'packages' like 'Sky Movies' and 'Sky Sports'.
An example of cable TV is 'Freeview'. It works by plugging your aerial cable into a 'Freeview Box' which is then plugged into the TV. All the signal comes through the aerial cable.
Advantages of Cable are: it's only a one-off payment for the Freeview box so no subscription, all of the channels are free (excluding a few like BT Sports).
Disadvantages of cable are: There are not as many channels as satellite TV, sometimes the signal goes without warning so has to be reset which then fixes the problem.

Analog is the signal which used to be used across the UK but now has been replaced by Digital because Digital has a much better quality. The UK has gone through the 'Digital Switchover' from analog to digital the process finished on October 24th 2012. The benefit of digital is that you can have more channels becuase the signal is constant, whereas analog signal troubles with adding new channels because you have to split the signal whilst adding new channels, which decreases the quality.


The Internet is becoming the place where a lot of people watch and listen to all sources of media. Music, films, TV programmes are all being consumed easily through the Internet for free. YouTube is a international video sharing website, so all of the videos (except rentable films) are free, and legally free, to watch. But, unfortunately for filmmakers there are video streaming/downloading websites which allow people to illegally watch their films for free. It is very difficult to prosecute people who watch the videos because of the sheer amount who do, but it is easier to do so for the people who are actually owning and operating the websites, though this is still very difficult. Because of the difficulties in stopping it, I am sure that the Internet will become the main source of media consumption.

The availability of editing software for anybody makes it open for people to edit whatever they want, and videos on YouTube are very easy to download so that you can edit them yourself into something new like a parody, or can change the dubbing which makes the videos interactive on a physical level. Interactivity in media can also be much simpler like being to pause, play fast forward and rewind television on 'Sky+'. Also on some television programmes, especially on the BBC, you are able to "press the red button" to access extra content from that programme, and also access the BBC's text news (ranging from entertainment to sports news) and weather, all whilst you are watching whatever is on.

The constant progression of camera technology has allowed for HD (high definition) television, there though to view anything in HD you have to have a certain type of TV which is compatible with HD. High definition viewing is also superseding the DVD market with Blu-Ray players and discs. Blu-Ray discs can play a film in 1080p whereas old DVDs were only up to a maximum of 480p, making the Blu-Ray discs much better quality. Again though, you have to have a Blu-Ray compatible player to actually watch the high definition films.
Broadening technology has also made it able for people to be able to watch 3D TV. According to Wikipedia -"3D television (3DTV) is television that conveys depth perception to the viewer by employing techniques such as stereoscopic display, multi-view display, 2D-plus-depth, or any other form of 3D display. Most modern 3D television sets use an active shutter 3D system or a polarized 3D system, and some are autostereoscopic without the need of glasses."
 
'Pay Per View' is a method of watch certain television programmes in which you have to pay everytime you watch a certain programme or channel. An example of this would be WWE Wrestling, who every month have a special show which is more extravigant and longer than a regular show, each 'Pay Per View' (which is what they actually call it) finishes off/adds to the storylines which have been developed during the the normal programmes.

On-demand viewing is basically programmes which you can watch whenever you want to through On-demand websites. Examples of on-demand TV websites are 4OD and BBC iPlayer, 4OD is a much broader on-demand website because they allow a much broader selection of tv programmes to be watched on the website for free, whereas the iPlayer only has the programmes of the last 3/4 weeks on there, not classic programmes. Also the BBC iPlayer has no adverts whereas 4OD does.

'Streaming content' is the phrase used to describe the mothod of watching things (films, tv shows, musci videos etc.) online. The difference between streaming and downloading is that with streaming you don't have to download anything to your computer to watch it (other than flash players etc), instead you watch the video at the same time as it loads. The problem with streaming however is that if you computer is not fast enough to load the video whilst you are watching then the video with keep stopping and buffering whilst it tries to load, which can be very annoying and makes streaming very difficult for some people. Also, streaming can be legal on sites like YouTube and NetFlix, but there are also lots of streaming websites where you can watch a huge amount of films and tv shows illegally. They are illegal because the content being broadcasted on these websites are free, so not having any money go to the filmmakers.

A digital recorder is a box that you can put into your tv which recorder digital television and saves it onto a hard-drive inside of the box. They were created in the 1980s, they allow you to zoom in or out on different parts of the images, it also allows you to slow down and speed up the programme. Digital audio recorders are very similar because instead of using tapes to store their infomation they use memory sticks/cards, this type of technology is a lot cheaper than different types of recording equipment. Digital audio recorders can be used to capture any type of audio, the information you record will be saved as either MP3, WAV or WMA, this information can then be saved onto some form of memory store.