That’ll Never Work

Gee, I wish I could see into the future. Well, maybe I can. When I saw, then made, my first QuickTime™movie I thought it was, well – useful. But beyond making video previews, I didn’t think it would ever be as big as “full motion video.”

When AVID came out with ‘AVR24’ resolution and called it ‘broadcast’ I laughed to myself. “That may fly on cable, but it’ll never air on network TV!”

And cell phone video, how great is that ?

Well, my 2 year old computer does a decent job at playing 720p video at 24fps. George Schlatter Productions used AVR24 to edit skits on his 1994 series “She-TV“. And YouTube is getting lots of hits with it’s cell phone camera and webcam uploads. So what’s next? Nah, downloading Hollywood features over the internet will never be big. Right !

In 1996, GENE JANKOWSKI, the former President of CBS, told an interviewer from the BBC:

“The Internet I associate more with cable and with phone companies. It has nothing, the Internet has nothing to do with why people want to watch 60 Minutes or ER or Dallas. In the last couple of years there’s been a tremendous amount of attention focused on technology and the new equipment and digitalization etc and so forth and my attitude is that we cannot lose sight of the fact that it’s not technology that gives value to man, but rather it is people with creative ideas that give value to the technology. We don’t go out and buy a VCR just because we want to own a VCR, we buy it because it gives us the opportunity to see the creative programming that we can play through our VCR.”