A few definitions of digital television (01/20/2010)
(...) This was a technology developed in Japan that promised to greatly improve the quality of the television image by increasing the definition, or number of scanning lines, of the picture, using analogue methods. It also rearranged the aspect ratio of the screen, from the boxy 4 to 3 ratio of traditional television to a more cinemascope-like 16 to 9, allowing movies to be shown on home television sets in their usual proportions, without cropping the picture or having to letterbox it. Japan became the first country to initiate regular HDTV broadcasts in 1992. (...)

Production and distribution of digital and cable television (01/20/2010)
(...) Distribution Thanks to the enormous transformation of connectivity brought about by the Internet and World Wide Web, it is in the area of distribution that digital technology has most affected television. From a medium originally sent out from a few fixed analogue transmitters mounted high above the ground on antennas, to the advent of coaxial cable and, later, fibre-optic cable that took the television signal through fat wires into the home, to satellite signals caught by, at first, dishes big enough to block the sunlight, or, beginning in the 1980s, via bulky videotapes, television has become a medium that can be broken up into bits, streamed and captured by virtually anyone to virtually anyone. Digital television is, effectively, digitally transmitted television, no matter what form it originated in or what form it ultimately takes at the reception end. (...)

How digital films are distributed and exhibited (01/20/2010)
(...) It is also easier to ‘scale up' with extra digital copies if a small film achieves surprising box office success. Worldwide release for major films such as The Da Vinci Code (Howard 2006) and Mission Impossible III (Abrams 2004) is replacing staggered global release strategies. The latter allowed for the too easily pirated copying of initial release prints such that later releases were forced to directly compete with, or even be pre-empted by, pirate copies. (...)

How to understand the concept of New Media (01/19/2010)
(...) Ideas such as evolution in biology, communism in politics, the theory of relativity in physics and the emerging field of psychoanalysis attempted to explain the universe in scientific or quasi-scientific terms. In this way, modernism tended to challenge and revolutionize the religious mysticism of the pre-industrial world. With its belief in the scientific inevitability of progress, many aspects of modernism tended to have an optimistic belief in the power of modernity to transform human life for the better. (...)

The New Media and its democratic character (01/19/2010)
(...) Many critics argue that now even the political landscape is a triumph of image over substance, a terrifying symbol of the aphorism that ‘the medium is the message', that is, a world where how something is presented is actually more important than what is being presented. In particular, these critics tend to argue that the postmodern obsession with ‘image' over ‘depth' produces a superficial and artificial environment where little is taken seriously; that its predominantly ‘camp' aesthetic has turned everything into entertainment. The nightmarish vision of a world where all information is packaged as entertainment is perhaps further facilitated by a form of New Media that appears to give us so much choice, but ultimately ends up by limiting real choice; reducing everything to exactly the same commodified and consumerist product. (...)

The connection between postmodernism and New Media (01/19/2010)
(...) Perhaps the first signs of such a critical shift can be detected in the work of McLuhan. While McLuhan shared many of the modernist anxieties about the ideological influence of the media on a gullible and powerless audience, his work often betrayed an enthusiasm and excitement for the media that was seldom detected in modernist critical theory. Even his writing style seems steeped in the fragmented messages of the electronic media with famous aphorisms such as ‘the medium is the message' appearing to mimic advertising slogans or sound bites. (...)

Media and its economic influence (12/15/2009)
(...) In view of the definitional complexities and disagreements alluded to above, "sizing" the creative industries has never been a straightforward, transparent exercise, and commentators have been quick to seize on perceived sleights of hand. "The more the [UK] Government promotes the special role of the creative industries," observed The Guardian in 1999, for instance, "the more vague the definition of what a creative industry is. At the start of last year Chris Smith [then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport] had them earning more than £50 billion. (...)

Mapping of the media (12/15/2009)
(...) Misleading but, as I argue below, revealingly so: conferring comparability on extremely diverse areas of the economy, and thus constituting a single identifiable "creative economy" at large, was a critical element of the project. Thus, if the analysis of "Television and radio" could claim a moderate degree of depth and breadth, only two pages could be mustered on "Advertising," while only a smidgen over one was offered on "Crafts." For each individual sub-sector, the report authors endeavored to provide information on six main fronts. (...)

Television and political debate (12/15/2009)
(...) Yet Mitchell's work, in particular, goes a step further, by thinking through and elucidating the specific mechanics of this coupling. And it is this aspect of Mitchell's work-his argument that these representative conventions essentially make subjects and objects available to power by "enframing" them, by rendering them separable, visible, discrete and calculable- that I draw on here. My objective is not just to link representation to the exercise of power, then, but to say something tangible about the actual fabric and flow of such power. (...)

Governmental control of the media (12/15/2009)
(...) 3 percent share of the UK economy as a whole? For, if the comparison with 16 percent suggests underperformance, a comparison with 5.3 percent would clearly suggest an exceptionally strong performance. To justify the direct benchmarking only against other Creative and Media Industries (which range, we should remind ourselves, from software to fashion and from arts and antiques to architecture, and within which the UK's strongest individual export performance is in music), surely one should demonstrate first that the sources of relative competitive advantage, not to mention international trade dynamics, are closely comparable across all of these areas. (...)