Has HD hit a ‘Tipping Point’?

June 4, 2008

 
A ‘Tipping Point’ is reached when ”the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable” - or so said Malcolm Gladwell in his excellent book on the nature of tipping points. In his book he remarked on the shape taken by an epidemic, that it can reach a point when suddenly it spreads like wildfire, everyone catches it, and then just as quickly it can die out. He then took that shape and applied it to all sorts of situations in life. He used the ‘tipping point’ argument to explain how films with tiny budgets or books by unknown authors can suddenly can suddenly become world-wide hits based simply on a spreading word-of-mouth.

I was searching around for a recent example and ‘Crocs’ came to mind; those appalling plastic shoes from (I’ll admit this is a guess and I don’t actually know) Australia, that seemed to appear overnight. One minute nobody was wearing them, then everyone and his wife and all their children were wearing them in a variety of colours depending on what day of the week it was. Shops sprung up that sold nothing else. I have been assured that they are very comfortable, but like a flu epidemic they will soon die out. People will get bored of wearing the same shoes as everyone else and in a couple of years we will see them only occasionally, and the shops that sprung up mid-epidemic will have dimmed their lights.

Although the dimming of the lights part of the analogy is probably not the case with HD TV, with the launch of freesat at the beginning of the month finally offering people the opportunity to realise the potential of those huge HD Ready TVs they all bought two Christmas’s ago, is this finally the tipping point for HD TV.

Certainly some large corporate have been producing films on HD for a while now, even though they have often only delivered it to staff and customers on Standard Definition, because the infrastructure to watch high definition pictures just hasn’t been widely available. That is certainly now changing. Blu-Ray DVDs are becoming more popular and it won’t be long before the internet can offer subscribers broadband that can deliver true HD pictures. Certainly within some companies their intranets are already working towards this.

This month we produced a number of short films shot on HD for a client who provides television and internet systems to hotels and who are about to launch a full HD TV delivery platform for hotel clients. Other clients want to shoot on HD to start building an HD library of footage for future projects. The momentum to HD is certainly growing and will accelerate.  

Posted by mucklehen
Filed in Filming on Location, High Definition, Tipping Point, communication ·Tags: , ,
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