As I write this post I’m sat in a comfy chair in our brand new family den, equipped with a 32” LG LCD TV (HD Ready of course) and my trusty XBox360, which is currently playing Babylon 5 season 3 on DVD, which I have to say looks stunning as it’s been upscaled by the 360.

It got me thinking, something I do every now and then, about how the act of watching video has evolved in the 25 years I’ve been around, as you can imagine I’ve got a fair amount of experience. So come with me (if you want to live!) on a journey through my personal evolution of video consumption.

The Early Days

I remember being about 2 or 3 years old, we had a fairly good TV, about 21” if I remember correctly, and a VHS video cassette recorder, which we rented from the local electronics shop (this was a very common practice, the players still cost a great deal of money to buy outright in the 80s) I remember my parents renting videos from the local store, classics like Mr Men, Thunderbirds and of course the Disney movies.

Looking back, the process was messy, having to rewind a tape before you could watch it again, having poor quality and being careful not to damage the tape, or accidentally urinate in the top loading player (yes, I did actually do that, much to my mother’s horror, hey when you gotta go you gotta go!). I do have fond memories of sitting with my parents watching some great shows and movies.

Not much changed with this setup, we purchased our own VCR, I suppose we’ve never really been early adopters in terms of new technology as a family, of course my purchased video collection did start to grow and we amassed a huge amount of recorded material from TV.

DVD - The Next Generation

I remember seeing DVD video for the first time at a family friend’s home, I was impressed with the video quality and the ease of navigation, not to mention the special features, being a geek I loved the idea of an audio commentary on my favourite sci-fi movies. We got a cheap player at home, and slowly began to build up a library, of course my PC of the time could play DVDs, but the 15” 4:3 monitor was not exactly the best for entertainment.

At this point there really wasn’t any online video, the odd clip here and there, but certainly no full length movies, and with broadband only just taking off, our first connection was 128kbps down, the chances of being able to download the latest movie or TV show in any sort of timely manner was out of the question.

As the years went by, my DVD library grew and as I finally got a good spec PC (I wasn’t yet a Mac convert at this time) I began to rip a few DVDs to my laptop to watch on the train.

The Digital Revolution

I’d had an MP3 player for quite some time, but never anything that could play video back, but that changed, I bought an Archos AV420, which had a huge, for the time, 20 Gb hard drive, it would play DivX video, so of course I began to encode shows I’d been able to rip, or even download (at this point we had a whopping 2mb internet connection) from various illicit sources (there weren’t really any legal sources at this point) and I thought that was fantastic, ok so it was a bulky device with a less than perfect UI.

Then, came the start of the Apple addiction, I decided to give the iPod a try, and was blown away by the UI and the ease of loading video content onto the device, of course using h.264 meant the quality was a huge improvement over what I’d experienced before. I was still collecting DVDs, I was still unaware of a legitimate source of downloading TV shows and movies (the iTunes Store didn’t have the content, yet), but I started ripping each new DVD into my collection so I could carry a good selection on my iPod.

I got my first Mac in October 2006, which got me hooked on iTunes as a way to download my music, I used the amazing Handbrake app to rip my DVDs and get these into iTunes to sync across to the iPod. Of course, once I got my iPhone and the iTunes store had TV & Movies available I found I was increasingly using that as my primary method of purchasing new video content, the concept of having a physical disc didn’t bother me at all, I wanted the video ready to go on my Mac and iPhone, which, at the end of the day, are the devices I tend to watch most of my video content on.

It’s gotten to the point now where I even use my Xbox360 to stream video from the Mac to our new TV, using the great app ‘Rivet’, and now with more and more online video streaming sites, such as the BBC iPlayer, SkyPlayer, Hulu etc and more and more video podcasts of high quality, such as Diggnation, Totally Rad Show and of course the amazing ScreenCastsOnline, I really feel the way forward is downloaded, yes I will be buying a PS3 to get a great quality Blu-Ray player, since as yet there’s no really great way of getting HD movies (the iTunes store only allows HD movies on the AppleTV.

Some of you may be asking, what about the special features you love so much? Well, that’s a very good question, certainly buying DVDs will give me the extras I love to watch, but recently I’ve not had the time to enjoy them, so it seemed digital downloads were a better way for me to get the content I wanted, it’s certainly a lot more convenient than either ordering from Play.com or Amazon or worse going to the local retailer to buy the DVD.

So that’s my journey, I’m loving where we are right now, being able to consume video content on something as small and simple to use and the iPhone and at the same time be able to get this on our nice new TV through streaming technology.

I’d love to know some of your experiences, that’s what the comments are for, let’s give the SquareSpace servers some fun keeping up shall we?

- Stu