Digital Media Technology: Industry Trends and Developments

breathtaking change, the term digital media is wonderfully flexible. Digital media can be anything from content on a CD or a set-top box to the bits streaming through the ether or over fiber. From my point of view and major area of interest, digital media starts with the hardware bits and pieces necessary to bring all the elements together in one place at one time for human consumption. When we consider processor cycles—for both humans and machines—digital media is mostly about images, which are formed from computer graphics or video. Audio and communications constitute important parts of the equation, of course, and we wouldn’t have much of a media experience without them. However, our brains and machines spend most of their time processing images. Digital media traces its roots back to a couple of places, depending on your point of view and definitions. The notion of electronic media started with analog television in terms of a full user experience. With the advent of computers, we’ve been trying to do as well ever since. Embodied within the notion of digital media is the concept of convergence, which also has several meanings depending upon who is using it. Basically, convergence refers to the marriage of computers and television, or to the marriage of digital media and the Net (see Figure 1). It’s a maddening and exciting potpourri of terms and technologies. We are trying to get every source into every device, and create an equal experience through all of them—a plan for the future known as everything, everywhere. Although we can’t achieve everything, everywhere with today’s technology, there is general agreement that it’s just a matter of time before we can. Thus, the related industries are investing massive amounts of money and effort toward that goal. Because the visual aspect of digital media technologies is so pervasive and resource consuming, that’s where a majority of the effort is going.