New Foundations for Video Technology: Which Ones Do We Build on and Why?

GIVEN The audience reading or listening to this paper is 100 percent composed of engineers and managers all searching for new foundations on which to build growing, profitable 21st century entertainment production and broadcasting businesses. “Technology” is in reality a two-headed beast which both helps and hinders this effort. Emerging technologies provide many types of foundations for the new business opportunities in view. But the merging of these technologies with others, as they emerge, creates more but undefinable new business opportunities, that the new foundations may not be designed to support. — The almost complete merger of the separate and bitterly competitive motion picture and television entertainment production and distribution industries of fifty years ago is an example of business opportunities in view. The just beginning merger of computer and television technologies to create “interactive” “multimedia computers,” which operate on “information superhighways,” et al, is an example of undefined business opportunities — THEREFORE Foundations for future motion picture or television production, postproduction and distribution systems therefore need to be designed as “future-proof.” How can that goal be achieved, if the opportunities are invisible behind the fog formed by these descriptors? — Directing the question to RCA Camden for an answer was a technique that worked in the 1970s. Choosing one hardware manufacturer for cameras, VTRs, cart machines and switchers, a second for editing and effects systems, and a third for master control and routing, was the more complex but still satisfactory 1980s technique. Engineers on staff and savvy broadcast industry consultants provided the facilities design expertise. — In the 1990s, –? Few companies have engineers on staff with time for detailed facilities design assignments. A comparison of the NAB exhibitor rosters of the mid 1980s and 1995 establishes that an alarming number of the old reliable hardware companies have been replaced by unknown but fast growing companies with strange coined names and software products. Computer technology dominates the design of hardware products. Product improvements are effected by installing a another software “rev.” Analog is being engulfed by digital, and compressed digital is the future. Long-time “filmless” facilities are now trending toward “tapeless.” Fiber is becoming the transmission medium of choice. The government-touted National Information Infrastructure and HDTV for the masses are posited as the future of the broadcasting industry. — Obviously, maintaining the viability and profitability of a motion picture or television facility into the undefinable future isn't doing more of what you did in the 1970s and 1980s.

Published

1995-02

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00847

ISBN

978-1-61482-922-5