Page 15 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

6 Geoffrey Sykes

Sometimes licences and production funding was given to public broadcasters,
but generally, in America and Australia at least, television developed on a
quite commercial basis – based on the financial investment required to
establish and run stations. Mass audiences, entertainment, networkings,
scheduling, advertising, production values and genres – the hallmarks of mass
media, that can be the subject of distrust by legal practitioners, were very
much predicated and in part determined by the nature and costs of broadcast
technology.
The history and development of television technology is fascinating, from
black and white to colour, through video tape and editing, improvements in
image quality, and development of external and portable equipment. The
technology of media has continually, over the past six decades, established
parameters that have in part determined the content and style of programming.
Unlike analogue technology, which literally reproduces and records events
onto expensive, material medium such as film, digital media encodes moving
images as mathematical and electronic signals, ensuring faster, cheaper and
more efficient equipment and methods for all stages of production and
transmission. The term digital is ubiquitous, and to a large extent its popular
commercial and public usage remains vague as to its precise technical
meaning. The digitisation of the fundamental processes and features of
technical engineering is also Janus-like in its application in industry and
consumer domains. To a large extent digital technology can reproduce,
conserve and extend the existing services of the television industry, such as in
digital TV, with improved quality, quantity and audience appeal. The
mathematisation of processes is not always transparent to audiences, who see
more and even better of the same. Yet the same technology that produces more
glamorous high definition images can also produce mobile, portable and high
quality ―prosumer‖ equipment that can be used to subvert and supplement the
services of mass media.
While an earlier generation of portable, analogue portapak equipment
existed, along with earlier versions of videoconference and ubiquitous
surveillance security cameras, the results were typically inferior compared to
the production quality of broadcast television. The poorer quality did not serve
to promote their adoption in legal domains. That boundary, of production and
equipment quality, has now very much been blurred. A courtroom
videoconference can produce large screen, high definition quality that rivals
broadcast programs. Police and security videos can often be in colour with a
marked improvement in quality and definition.