For Those Who Were Sleeping: Justifications for the Digital Age

Somewhere, online or in print, at any given hour of the day on any one of the settled continents, there is a headline blaring the catchphrase “digital age” somewhere in its midst.  It’s a phrase that has already lost any sense of novelty in speaking it or writing it – it just seems to come with the territory, a distant piece of primeval etymology. To say, “Digital age!” almost anywhere on Earth would be the equivalent of saying, “Cars and trucks!” in the middle of a freeway traffic jam. Yes, we all know how “information” has become “digitized” to the nth degree. But what are the advantages of this means of record-keeping over, say, the libraries that civilization has painstakingly accumulated over the course of hundreds of years? What are the practical gains of being able to record sounds and images “digitally” as opposed to the analog formats we all grew up with?

Is this a case of technology taking over by sheer force of traction and advertising? Is the digital age a “necessary” age?

Well, the short answer is that like it or not, the digital age is upon us. For those who choose to ignore the implications of its technological achievements, they stand to lose out against those who have dedicated their lives and careers towards “mastering” the new formats.

Binary code enabled us to enter the 'Digital Age,'
by breaking everything down into bits from the blogs we read
to the pictures we send friends. 

But there’s a longer and more logical answer as well. The digital age has standardized the flow of many different types of information – telephone calls, photographs, television sets, libraries, billboard advertising, and advanced communication – into a single flowing river of zeroes and ones. The images you take (via digital camera or smartphone) of your friends and family on vacation in Brazil are formed of the same “bits” that comprise the online blogs you read while bored at work, back in your New York cubicle. Unlike the Eastman Kodak photo albums of just a few years back, these images are easily printable – and furthermore erasable. Likewise, the graphic quality of digital images far surpasses the finest film developing facilities that America ever produced. The 8-megapixel camera on a $99 smartphone already is capable of displaying graphic resolutions that the human eye, for all its sharpness, fails at discerning.

The digital age has done for information what the industrial revolution did for material parts: information that would have been hard to find 20 years ago is now easily replicable. You can now balance libraries more extensive than the Library of Congress in your lap as you sip your latte at the “bookstore.”

Just like any other major technological revolution in human history, the digital age has its detractors and naysayers. But it is here to stay for the foreseeable time being, and should be welcomed – at the very least – out of sheer necessity.

How High Can Resolution Climb and Still Be Cost-Effective?

In a few, quick years - years that feel more like quantum leaps than years, at least in our industry - we have witnessed the transformation of SD picture quality into ever higher levels of resolution. Even the much-touted HDTV – with its 16.8 million approximate primary color variations (more gradations than the human eye is capable of detecting) – has begun to feel outdated in the face of new technology coming down the pipeline. As I write these words, there are 16-bit visual display platforms developed that can articulate upwards of 280 trillion possible shades of primary color, a number dwarfing what only a few years ago seemed like a pioneering achievement. We are a far, indiscernible cry away from the days of the SD pictorial quality we all grew up with watching on television. Given the current rate at which ever more sharp resolutions are being adapted for the market, we can only assume that the “resolution revolution” still has a ways to go before manufacturers and technicians realize that there is no need to proceed beyond the very high standards already set.

Simply put, the bit rate transmissions to sustain that level of resolution for broadband applications would cost ludicrous amounts of money. We’re still living in an age of transition, where encoding technology is desperately striving to keep pace with the platforms which it is expected to provide functionality to. While new and higher resolution video technologies will doubtless continue playing a key part in the ongoing digital revolution, encoding technology needs to sharpen its performance level to match the already-overtaxed needs of the system as it stands. Simply ladling more pixels into an already high-resolution visual framework may prove to be a case of “gilding the lily,” adding unnecessary resolution at a price not worth paying. After all, a higher pixel count equals a higher cost.

Not only is Telairity a thought-leader and advocator for encoding technology to “catch up” with the network systems already in place, but we’ve actually made good on our word by the products we’ve developed. We are neck-and-neck with current digital technology as it stands, and customers around the globe – from Silicon Valley to Sydney to Beijing to Dubai – are well aware of this. We will continue overcoming all future technological hurdles placed in our path.