Video has come a long way during this decade.  The DVD format was defined in the late 90’s, and by the early 2000’s was becoming a common feature of the living room, with disc prices falling to the levels that the mass market were ready to pay.  Today, in 2009, the market for VHS tapes has now more-or-less dissipated, and in my household the only VHS that still exist are either historical (for example the 2000 London Marathon taped from the TV; the first marathon I ran in) or well-loved children’s classics like “Fantasia”.

DVD players have changed a lot during the decade, and the latest ones support just about any kind of disc you can put in them (picture disc, DivX encoded etc).  Now of course DVD is itself under threat with the increased adoption of Blu-Ray, which offers higher capacity, quality, and picture size.

However, there is a bigger challenge than physical formats, and that is electronic formats, including video streaming and files that contain video information.  The Internet has increasingly become the centre of a lot of entertainment needs, and this is also true with video.  YouTube (established only in 1995) is a name the most people know, and now serves over a billion video views per day.   In the UK, the BBC launched a service in 2007 called iPlayer, that allows live streaming of their content to UK residents' computers; this now accounts for 20% of the Internet traffic in the UK. Video can also be represented in files (kept on a PC or Mac) that can be played back on a computer, including QuickTime, Flash, Windows Media, MPEG, AVI and others.  This means that videos that used to be controlled by physical anti-copying technologies (that are built into VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray) can simply be represented as a file that can be copied, transmitted, even altered.

This is a huge challenge to the copyright owners as increasingly the material goes “on-line”.  I am personally not a big fan of DRM ( Digital Rights Management ), but neither am a fan of professional pirates that rip material in order to “publish” it themselves.  A friend of mine in the film and television industry hit the nail on the head when told me “those in favour of the ability to freely copy copyrighted material across the Internet are not normally the people that have to earn a living from creating the content”.  Somewhere we need to strike a balance between control and convenience so that we can enjoy video on our iPods, phones and PCs, while at the same time keeping the content industry vital.