In the early 1980s, the major film studios took on prominent VCR manufacturers in a battle to suppress home video recording technology. This new analog system could record and reproduce television and movies with little to no effort and very little cost to the consumer. This shift in power from major media studios to the consumer was only the beginning of an even larger revolution that would take place almost 20 years later when digital media — in the form of movies, music, and more — would become easily accessible and transferable to average consumers through advancements in high-speed Internet. Websites like www.direct.tv also make it easier for anyone to be updated about the best entertainment deals.
Although the major movie studios felt threatened by the invention of the VCR, the technology was inferior to live television and in-theater movies because the analog format degraded over time. That simply means that the more a videocassette, audio tape, or vinyl LP, was played or copied, the quality of the video and/or audio tracks lost clarity and sharpness. However, this problem was fixed with the advent of digital media formats.
Digital media audio and video formats do not degrade over time. This is because digital media is simply made up of information, which is, at its very center, binary code — 1s and 0s. With analog media, some sort of physical contact is needed — the needle on a record, the heads on a VCR — this physical interaction of the storage media and the media player causes the source to decay. But this is not so with digital media. The source code for the media is read through a digital eye (as is the case with CD and DVDs), or simply read directly from a hard drive, as is the case with mp3’s and other digital media files.
Although major media companies have had battles over the years with digital piracy, through platforms like iTunes, major studios and record companies are finally coming to embrace the advancements made in digital media.
