The other day, I wrote this blog entry about digital video. Since then, Jock Gill wrote an entry at Greater Democracy about Digital Video and Geoff Fox wrote this entry which also touches on digital video.

In response, I commented over at Greater Democracy:

I have mixed feelings about digital video. I expect that we will move to a world where people demand big broadband. As an aside, back when I first connected, using a 110 baud connection, and then a 300 baud connection, I considered 1200 bps broadband. When I moved up to 1200 bps, I thought a 9600 bps modem was broadband, and so on through 14.4k, 28.8k, ISDN and now cable modem.

Parkinson's law tells us that no one will ever have enough broadband.
But the question becomes, what are we going to do with it? I remember the line from Pink Floyd, "I've got 13 channels of shit on the TV to chose from." Well, now we have hundreds of channels, and still none of them are all that good.

In the future, we will all be able to view everyone's home videos online. I just hope that when this happens, they will be more interesting than the home videos that I had to watch as a kid. If blogging is any indication, it is likely to be a mixed bad.

This mixed bag may end up moving us from a digital divide to a digital video divide.

Continuing with that theme, over on Geoff’s blog, I wrote:

I'm particularly interested in how the "hot breath of the Internet is being felt on the back of TV's neck." I wrote a little bit about what is going on with digital video on my blog and a friend has written a little about some of the underlying technology issues at Greater Democracy.

I think your comments about "Shooting a video camera is as much an art as anything else I can think of" are very important to keep in mind. These days everyone seems to have cellphones with cameras built in and effectively, can be citizen photojournalists. At some point, citizen video journalism will be possible. However, giving someone a camera doesn't make them a photographer.

There has been lots of talk about the Digital Divide in the past. Perhaps we will talk about the Video Divide in the future.