The Pipe & The Straw

posted by John Lampard on Friday, 2 May, 2008 to the comment subset

The Pipe & The Straw

The digital television revolution may not quite create the upheaval television companies are envisaging, or hoping for.

While digital broadcasting will facilitate a greater volume of better quality transmissions, will anyone care, or more accurately, have time to absorb all this high-definition content?

Especially when viewers have the option to browse sites such as YouTube and pick and choose what to see, and when.

There is a critical and frequently overlooked difference between broadcast transmission, and content delivered by the Internet. Broadcast is about beaming content to a particular audience at a particular point of time. On the Internet, content is broken into lots of small pieces, stored in the cloud and reassembled when people actually request it. True – at present it is less reliable and lower in resolution than digital broadcast – but it is also infinitely more flexible and adaptable.

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