As the digital media industry prepares for its annual trek to NAB, we thought we'd take a brief pause from the frenzy and present a look at the broad changes to the video landscape over time. Today, we stand on the precipice of an expanding video universe unlike anything we’ve seen in the past 60 years. Until very recently, suppliers and consumers of media saw fairly linear growth of TV channels and available video content; even the deluge of content that arrived with HDTV five years ago was miniscule compared to the amount of media now accessible with video-enabled IP devices.
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In 1948, mass production of black and white televisions revolutionized entertainment, bringing professionally produced video content into the home for the first time. TV in the home made the dissemination of information more fluid, provided a boom for programming networks and paved the way for successive innovations in the media world.
After the initial rabbit ears came color TV, then cable TV, digital TV, satellite TV, and most recently, HDTV. Each decade of advancement in technology drove a hand-in-hand exchange between supply and demand that by Y2K left us staring at hundreds of linear content channels and wondering: Where will media mulitply next?
It's been a long, but worthwhile, wait since the last 