Developing Technologies in the Film and TV Industries

Consumer Products

Making high-quality moving image productions was a privilege reserved for a select few up until the last 10 years.  Now, we have all kinds of cameras and editing software, and computers that can handle intense visual effects available to us as the public.

Satellite and Cable

Satellite TV works as an evolution of Broadcast TV wherein the signal is broadcast to a satellite, and then down to customers with satellite dishes installed in their homes.

Cable works through previously laid-out infrastructure of cables in the ground, which radio waves are transmitted along and directly to customers’ homes.

Satellite TV is useful in more rural areas where it would be less economically viable to install cable infrastructure, but cable is less prone to weather issues and is generally seen as higher quality.

Analogue and Digital

Analogue TV is a mostly outdated medium now, but when it was in full swing it was broadcasted with radio waves, and you needed an antenna to pick up a limited selection of channels.

Digital TV is higher quality, and this is down to networks having more data per second to broadcast.

Internet

TV as a whole is slowly losing traction in favour of the internet, which gives users total freedom in what they want to watch or read.

Video can be from legal sources such as YouTube, Netflix, or iPlayer, and illegal methods like certain torrent trackers.

High Definition and 3D

High Definition or HD video was introduced in early 2005, and is so called because of its vastly sharper image over standard definition formats.

There are 4 formats carrying the HD moniker:

720i

720p

1080i

1080p

The number represents the amount of pixels the image has along the horizontal axis, while the ‘p’ and ‘I’ stand for ‘progressive’ and ‘interlaced’. These are to do with the framerate of the video. At the same framerate Interlaced will only update half as quickly as progressive because it updates half the image, then the other half, as opposed to progressive where the whole image is updated every time, twice as quickly as interlaced.

3D was always seen as a relatively gimmicky format for video until the recent advent of RealD, IMAX and other 3D technologies. They work through polarized lenses on special glasses, which only let certain light in. With 3D video, there are 2 slightly different versions of each frame to simulate the difference of images from either eye. Each frame is then displayed twice, with each of these versions one after the other, with different polarizations. This means that to maintain the framerate viewers are used to in film or indeed videogames, the actual framerate needs to be double what is being delivered. For instance, film is at 24. 3D movies would have to be displayed at 48 fps to compensate, and so on.

Soon after, 3D made its way into the living room with the first batch of 3D-enabled TV sets. Since the polarization technology was too expensive to fit into a consumer product, these first 3D TVs instead used special glasses called Active Glasses, which were coated in a special material that had the ability to toggle between transparent and totally opaque very quickly. This flickering from eye to eye was then synced with the TV as the glasses connected to it, and from then on the TV only needs to display the frames twice normally – no need for polarization. Later on, however, TVs with polarization technology and even ‘glasses-less’ 3D began to appear.

Pay-Per-View and On Demand Viewing

Pay-Per-View is offered by services like Sky and iTunes for films and wrestling, and it offers customers a film in exchange for a fee every time it is watched. On-Demand viewing is built around the same principle, except that it is either a subscription service like Netflix or free of charge like BBC’s iPlayer.

Streaming Content and Digital Recorders

Which leads us nicely into streaming content. By definition, ‘streaming’ is where video is fetched from the internet and viewed by the consumer at the same time – there is no download time and nothing is permanently stored on the user’s system. Many sites use this streaming technology:

YouTube

Netflix

Hulu

NowTV

iPlayer

4oD

ITV Player

Lovefilm

Amazon Prime Instant

And many more.