1234 and resolution

I once was taken away many a time by a music video. I witnessed the dawn of MTV. Of course, many of the videos of that time look more than a bit dated now. I've watched few in recent years, but still love music. I'm not so old that I can't appreciate this enjoyable tune by Fiest.

These days, not quite as many music videos stand out in my mind. Perhaps it's a curse of inexhaustible budgets, and music that's a little bit less than inspired. If you watch TV at all, you've seen a snippet of this one. It's part of the Ad for the new Apple Nano. A great choice on Apple's part, as this thing is catchy to the point of infective! I do think it's a great work, and worthy of the attention. It's very well produced, a great pop song, and it will probably be stuck in your head for a good while once you hear it.

Now for the rant. Once upon a time, 320 X 240 pixels would fill your computer screen. In time, it would cover just one quarter of the your display. And so the progression goes. Now that same video is about two inches across on my present display.

Yes, you can of course click a button on the Youtube player, as with most any other streaming video provider, and make it fill your screen. The resulting video looks much like the vintage Fisher Price video camera some of us have a fondness for. And what was the name of this camera? Pixelvision!

Could the problem be that the music companies are afraid that the video will be pirated? Very possibly so. It is certainly not an issue of storage space, as hard drives are so ridiculously inexpensive. Perhaps it's a consideration for the bandwidth impaired? No, as it's possible to encode multiple bandwidth streams in most every delivery medium on the planet. And no, it's definitely not a limitation of Flash, as you can find some amazing examples of high resolution Flash videos on the interwebs.

Could it be greed? Could it be fear? Both? It's hard to say. I do think that sites like YouTube should consider moving into this century. My eyesight isn't as sharp as it once was, and I don't enjoy postage stamps as I once did.