A ‘Tipping Point’ is reached when “the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable” – or so said Malcolm Gladwell in his excellent book on the nature of tipping points. In his book he remarked on the shape taken by an epidemic, that it can reach a point when suddenly it spreads like wildfire, everyone catches it, and then just as quickly it can die out. He then took that shape and applied it to all sorts of situations in life. He used the ‘tipping point’ argument to explain how films with tiny budgets or books by unknown authors can suddenly can suddenly become world-wide hits based simply on a spreading word-of-mouth.
Although the dimming of the lights part of the analogy is probably not the case with HD TV, with the launch of freesat at the beginning of the month finally offering people the opportunity to realise the potential of those huge HD Ready TVs they all bought two Christmas’s ago, is this finally the tipping point for HD TV.
Certainly some large corporate have been producing films on HD for a while now, even though they have often only delivered it to staff and customers on Standard Definition, because the infrastructure to watch high definition pictures just hasn’t been widely available. That is certainly now changing. Blu-Ray DVDs are becoming more popular and it won’t be long before the internet can offer subscribers broadband that can deliver true HD pictures. Certainly within some companies their intranets are already working towards this.
This month we produced a number of short films shot on HD for a client who provides television and internet systems to hotels and who are about to launch a full HD TV delivery platform for hotel clients. Other clients want to shoot on HD to start building an HD library of footage for future projects. The momentum to HD is certainly growing and will accelerate.
