A quick post for Christmas day. The Queen of England has begun the transmission of the Annual message via Youtube. The first few seconds of the broadcast for 2007 included a recording of the first televised message from 1957 with the unmistakable scanlines from the capture of the 411 line transmission used in 1957. On the Youtube version the poorer resolution of Flash hides this poor quality from the original transmission. In summary, we have moved forward 50 years to go back 50 years in broadcast quality – we accept poorer video quality than we had all that time ago. In fact, combined with the fact that many TVs were bigger back then than the size of the Youtube video today on the average modern monitor/screen, we have also lost physical impact.
Hmmm. An interesting thing to consider.
UPDATE
And in consideration, it seems that it comes back to one of the biggest problems for the HD industry – video reaches an acceptable quality level and after that it is the content that matters. Youtube is on that basic quality level now, somewhat about S-VHS quality. I have seen a similar problem before in the early noughties on continental Europe. Takeup of Digital TV was hampered by the easy availability of low cost multi-channel analogue packages. This has changed now, but only by making the cost of entry similar to the old analogue packages. Something that has makde Digital investment a problem. Time will tell, but it will be interesting when Youtube changes the default video resolution to more DVD or higher levels – will this be in 2008 or later?
