The Digital Video Horizon - What's Out There?
We got a lot of feedback from people wanting to see us cover digital video technologies some more, and that's what we are planning to do. With that in mind, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show, having recently come and gone, seemed like a good place to get the ball rolling so, we asked Wanda Meloni, Principal Analyst at M2 Research , to give us her take on the current state of the digital video market, look at a few of the products that impressed her at NAB, touch on a few technology trends and see what's on the horizon.
The Current Market
The digital video (DV) market is growing at an incredible rate. The acceptance of digital video cameras has helped fuel the market at both the consumer and professional levels. M2 Research estimates there were roughly 4 million digital video cameras sold in 2000, with the number projected to double in the next 2 years. Subsequently, total sales of consumer-based video editing solutions have also been doubling since 1998. And at the mid-to-high range, video editing solutions have seen annual growth rates of 20%.
The DV market is really made up of a number of vertical markets including post production and film, broadcast and videographers, government, corporate, education, web design, game development. Together the post, film and broadcast markets still make up the bulk of the market with 52% of all video editing work falling in this category. However, new growth is coming from the web, corporate, government, and educational markets.
Source: Digital Media Market Study, M2 Research
Thanks to the advent of DV we now have so many more flavors of interactive content for consumers to choose from, for content creators to create for and content providers to distribute to. Think about it, we now have DVD, HDTV, streaming media, Interactive TV, and wireless as new technology platforms for digital content. We cruised the show floor at NAB 2001 this year to take a look at some of the tools and technologies currently impacting the DV market.
