HDTV shows the way for online comms

Directed at entertainment, high-definition TV could also prove the turning point for video conferencing.

At a conference of the Westminster eForum, an all-party parliamentary group, the packed audience of TV buffs is hushed. Seetha Kumar, head of high-definition (HD) television at the BBC, shows a long close-up of Gillian Anderson, who played Lady Dedlock in the BBC blockbuster series Bleak House. Anderson is motionless, but her eyes, though equally unmoving, run through a series of clearly perceptible emotions. Indeed, they seem to replay the whole plot of the novel before the gaze of the audience.

It’s riveting stuff, this HDTV. But don’t get too excited just yet. Between 2008 and 2012, the Department of Culture Media and Sport, the new Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and our old friend Ofcom could easily bungle the switchover from analogue to digital TV.

But, while Labour politicians itch to include it in a new, still more comprehensive Communications Act, business has as much interest in taking HD seriously as TV viewers. HD allows you to see the whites of your client’s eyes with unprecedented clarity, so it could finally spark the long-awaited mass adoption of video conferencing. HD could be the thing that at last convinces businesses that physical presence in the same room with someone is really necessary only when a contract is being torn up or a P45 issued.

HD works not just on TV or in cinemas, but on YouTube, too. In business, therefore, face-based applications of the Web 2.0 genre will accommodate HD sooner or later. Indeed, the verisimilitude provided by HD could hasten business adoption of all kinds of Web 2.0 technologies.

HD currently focuses on movies, plus groundbreaking, exportable documentaries such as the BBC’s Planet Earth. Only later will sports and prime-time drama really be mass HD propositions. But for business, the cognitive argument for HD already convinces. In the US, TV viewers will watch any kind of HD content in preference to standard-definition NTSC, or what wags call Never The Same Colour Twice.

HDTV video cameras cost as little as £800. And when you use one, you don’t need special lighting in interior shots, although the precision that HD lends to images does put a premium on your craftsmanship.

The UK leads the EU in both the content and mass display of HD programming. The BBC and ITV will launch Freesat, which will carry HD, next year, and in a mere 10 months, Sky has won 250,000 subscriptions to HDTV. Once more consumers and directors get used to HD, its effect on business is likely to be explosive.